Paola Gabriela Villa Paro

Paola is a third-year PhD student in Economics at the University of Michigan, with fields in Public Finance, IO, and Labor Economics. Her research examines how policy and institutional design shape labor markets and inequality. Her current work studies the implementation and repeal of Peru’s Agrarian Promotion Law, using this reform, which altered profit taxes for agro-industrial firms and introduced a flexible labor regime, to quantify how policy wedges reshape worker sorting, wages, and employment. She also has ongoing projects exploring demand for redistribution under perceived local inequality and retirement self-insurance among informal workers. Before her doctorate, she spent three years as a predoctoral research fellow at Princeton University working with Ilyana Kuziemko and Henrik Kleven. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics summa cum laude from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.