Dr Elisabetta De Cao is Assistant Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is also an Associate Member of MiSoC at the University of Essex, a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of African Economies of the University of Oxford, and a Dondena (Center for Research and Social Dynamics) Research Affiliate at Bocconi University.

Dr De Cao's main research interests are in health economics and family economics. Dr De Cao is particularly interested in global health problems. Her current work studies the determinants of children’s health and human capital development, the impact of early life shocks on later outcomes, and violence against women and children. She has also done work on statistical modelling for infectious diseases and on the evaluation of vaccination programs. To investigate her research questions, Dr De Cao uses various causal inference methods, and micro-data from across developed (mainly US and UK) and developing countries (mainly Africa).

Current research projects include studying the effect of unemployment on child maltreatment in the United States, the effect of the economic recession on infants’ health in England, the impact of education on female genital cutting in Nigeria, how to measure attitudes toward child marriage and inter-partner violence in Bangladesh, and the interplay between genetics and the environment (gene-environmental interaction) in determining health using various British datasets.

CV and Publications

Teaching

Programme Co-Director, MSc Health Data Science
HP426 Applied Health Econometrics
HP4D5E Research Design for Evaluation Health Programs and Policies
HP4F2E Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Healthcare Programs and Policies

Affiliations

Associate Member, MiSoC, University of Essex
Research Affiliate, Dondena (Center for Research and Social Dynamics), Bocconi University
Research Fellow, Institute of Labour Economics
John Snow Society Membership