Investigador
Luisa Fuster is Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales. She was previously a tenured Associate Professor of economics at the University of Toronto and has also held full time Faculty positions at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (as an Assistant and later tenured Associate Professor) and at the University of Western Ontario. Dr Fuster earned her PhD in economics from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona in 1994 and subsequently was a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Professor Fuster’s research spans across fields, including macroeconomics, public finance and labor economics. It has dealt with such issues as the macroeconomic and distributive effects of government tax policies, the welfare consequences of the social security system, social security reform, and the effects of altruistic transfers and accidental bequests on capital accumulation and the distribution of wealth. Her recent research focuses on understanding gender differences in labor supply and wages. In particular, Dr Fuster has reported empirical regularities in gender differences in wages and has built a quantitative theory of labor supply and fertility decisions that is consistent with those observations. She has used this theory to analyze the impact of family policies on female labor supply and wages. She has also developed a theory for the observed positive correlation between fertility rates and female employment rates across OECD countries. Understanding the trend of fertility rates in developed countries is important for evaluating the sustainability of current social security arrangements. Professor Fuster’s work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the International Economic Review, the Review of Economic Dynamics, and Economic Theory, among others. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Spanish Economic Review and was a member of the Editorial Board of Investigaciones Económicas, and has served as a referee for many prestigious international journals and for the National Science Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Professor Fuster has supervised a number of research projects that received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Foundation, the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. Her research has also received funding from the BBVA Foundation and the Ramon Areces Foundation. She is the recipient of various academic awards including a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the Dean’s Merit award for her contributions to the Economics Department at the University of Toronto during the period 2005-2006. In 2007 she passed her Habilitation Review before the Spanish Ministry of Education with the rank of Full Professor.