New Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC): Batyra, Ewa, and Luca Maria Pesando. 2022. "'Reverse Policies?' Reducing the Legal Minimum Age at Marriage Increases Child Marriage Among the Poorest in Mali." University of Pennsylvania Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC), 2022-89.
New Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC): Batyra, Ewa, Luca Maria Pesando, Andrés Castro, Frank Furstenberg, and Hans-Peter Kohler. 2022. "Union Formation, Within-Couple Dynamics, and Child Well-Being in Global Comparative Perspective." University of Pennsylvania Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC), 2022-84.
PSC/PARC Researchers Hans-Peter Kohler, Frank F. Furstenberg, Andres Felipe Castro Torres, and Luca Maria Pesando were featured in a Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research press release on their new article, "Family Change and Variation Through the Lens of Family Configurations in Low- and Middle-Income Countries," published in Population, Space, and Place and supported by the National Science Foundation. This paper is a result of the Global Family Change project, supported by the PSC, which is also a PARC Research Network.
Key Points:
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University
Ph.D., Demography & Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
M.A., Demography, University of Pennsylvania, 2016
M.Sc., Economics & Social Sciences, Bocconi University, 2012
B.A., Economics & Social Sciences,Bocconi University, 2010
I am an Assistant Professor of Demography and Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University. Before joining McGill, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania, primarily working on the Global Family Change (GFC) NSF-funded project (Award #1729185).
My research lies in the areas of social, economic, and digital demography. I am interested in issues of family poverty, inequality, gender, stratification, intra- and inter-generational processes, and interactions between life-cycle events and human capital accumulation. My overarching research aim is to produce better knowledge on the link between family change and educational inequalities in areas where these dynamics are changing rapidly and scant research is available.
Most of my work takes an international comparative perspective and focuses on low- and middle-income contexts undergoing economic, social, and demographic transformations. My main interest is in sub-Saharan Africa, but I have also conducted research on Europe, South Asia, Latin America, and the US. In my research I combine theoretical approaches from sociology and demography with the use of advanced econometric and statistical techniques. Thanks to my background in economics and applied statistical analysis - and prior work experience in the policy world - I have considerable expertise in implementing and evaluating randomized and quasi-randomized study designs. More recently, I have also increasingly conducted research using big data from Google, Facebook, and Twitter to map and understand socio-demographic phenomena.
I hold a Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology (2018) and an MA in Demography (2016) from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MSc (2012) and a BA (2010) in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.