Marta Favara

Marta Favara is a development economist with over 15 years of research experience. She joined the University of Oxford in 2015 and currently serves as the Director of the Young Lives study. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Essex (UK) and an MSc in Economics from the University of Leuven (Belgium). She has also been an IZA research affiliate since 2012 and a Researcher Fellow with the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance since 2018

Her research interests broadly encompass child development, employing applied microeconomic tools and frequently utilising panel or longitudinal datasets. Over the past fifteen years, she has investigated the impact of early childhood experiences of poverty and inequality on later life outcomes in areas such as nutrition and growth, schooling, skills development, family formation, and employment. This includes examining the extent to which social protection and other interventions can mitigate the effects of early deprivation. More recently, her focus has expanded to analyse the unprecedented impact of shocks and crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflict, and environmental shocks, on young people transitioning into adulthood. Marta recently launched and currently directs the Young Lives Research Hub on Climate Change and Environmental Shocks, aiming to generate policy-relevant evidence on the long-term and intergenerational impacts of extreme weather events, increasing temperatures, and worsening air pollution throughout the life-course.

She has served as the Principal Investigator for numerous grants, including a flagship investment from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to fund the Young Lives at Work programme. This is alongside grants for targeted research from the Wellcome Trust Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Medical Research Council, and the Old Dart Foundation.

Before joining Young Lives, Marta worked as an economist at the World Bank (Young Professionals Programme). She has been involved in several research projects, survey designs, impact evaluations, and policy dialogues with public and private institutions in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.