Spotlight: Promoting Young Scholars - Ana Oliveira

Ana Oliveira joined the Pillars Team at UNU-MERIT in February 2022. Get to know her.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Porto, and I will defend my dissertation in the coming months. In my dissertation, entitled “Essays on Technological Change, Growth and Labor Market Outcomes”, I look at the impact of technology-driven occupational changes on income distribution at the firm level and on wage inequality between men and women. I have worked with large administrative databases on employer-employee data, firms’ financial statements data, innovation surveys and firm-level trade data. I have also written an essay on technology, industrial policy and economic growth, which pushed me to develop theoretical skills.

The paper “Do Technological Advances Reduce the Gender Wage Gap?”, co-authored with Prof. Anna Salomons (Utrecht University) and Prof. Matias Cortes (York University), was published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. As a result of this publication, I was invited to give a talk at the Portuguese Parliament on the International Women’s Day 2021. I was given the award of best paper presented by a PhD candidate at the Portuguese Economic Journal’s annual conference with the paper “Labor Share and Firm Dynamics under Endogenous Market Structure and Economic Growth”.

Currently I am also participating on a research project to evaluate workers’ career prospects in specialized firms versus firms that employ a wider range of occupations, alongside Professor Anna Salomons (Utrecht University), Professor Matias Cortes (York University) and Diego Dabed (Utrecht University). Additionally, I am running a study on the career prospects of Portuguese doctorates employed in the private sector, and the changes in labor demand among high-skilled occupations, commissioned by the University of Porto.

During my doctoral studies I was a visiting researcher at Utrecht University and I was awarded with two research fellowships. I co-authored the book chapter “The Impact of Universities on Regional Competitiveness: A review of the main theoretical and methodological approaches”.

In 2019, I co-organized the full-day workshop “Technological Change and the Future of Jobs and the Labor Share of Income” (University of Porto). Until 2021 I was a students’ representative at the European University Alliance for Global Health and a member of my faculties’ Pedagogical Board.