Ms Cristina Santos

Lecturer in Economics

Economics

Qualifications

MSc Economics at University College London, PhD Economics at University College London (expected end of 2008)

Course Development and Teaching Commitments

Course team chair of Understanding Economic Behaviour: Households, Firms and Markets (D319).
Course team member of the new third-level Microeconomics course, which will replace D319.
Tutoring for Personal Finance: You and Your Money (DB123).

Research Interests

I am interested in the Economics of the Household, in how individuals make labour market participation, spending, saving, marriage, divorce and violence decisions, and in how policy and the socio-economic context can help ameliorate or worsen intrahousehold imbalances.

Along the same lines, I am interested in the Economics of Happiness and in approaches and theories that enrich the notions and working scope of well-being, mainly on the Capabilities Approach. I am currently involved in the Capabilities Measurement Project headed by Paul Anand.

I am currently involved (together with Susan Himmelweit) in a study, funded by UNDP, which assesses the gender effects of indirect taxation. This is part of an international development project, funded also by the Ford Foundation and IDRC, in which the other countries involved, who are running similar gender analyses of indirect taxation, are all developing countries. It is expected that the project will feed directly into national and international fiscal and development policy debates.

Recent Publications

Anand, P. and Santos, C. (2007). Violent crime, gender inequalities and well-being : models based on a survey of individual capabilities and crime rates for England and Wales, Revue d’Economie Politique, 117(1), pp. 877-902.

Drawing on data from a new survey of individual capabilities across a range of life domains, the paper explores gender inequalities in the causes, experiences and consequences of violent crime. Measuring not only experienced violence, but also feelings of fear and vulnerability to future experiences of violence, we attempt to show how these two types of variables interact and how they impact on well-being. Socio-demographic, economic, personality and environmental differences are taken into account. Key empirical findings include: the identification of a particularly vulnerable group using data for men and women separately; gender inequalities in the propensity to experience different forms of violence; gender inequalities in the impact of key factors, such as the number of dependent children, employment status, income (household and personal) and education, on the likelihood of experiencing violence; a strong link between experienced domestic violence and vulnerability to future domestic violence for women; and strong evidence of the negative impact of self-assessed vulnerability on well-being.

Current Working Papers
Santos, C. (2008). Estimating Individual Total Costs of Domestic Violence
This paper estimates total individual costs of domestic violence. It draws on a cross-section survey that includes data on self-reported victimization variables, individual income and a self-reported life satisfaction variable. Using a life satisfaction approach, it estimates the variation in income needed to compensate for the presence of domestic violence, approximating the shadow price of domestic violence. It accounts for socio- demographic characteristics, relative bargaining power, local crime rates and personality. Results show that the valuation respondents place on violence depends both on income and on whether they are men and women. Men's valuation tends to be more significant for low income levels and for low vulnerability levels. Women's valuation and marginal utility of income does not seem to depend significantly on violence. As such, women's average valuation is estimated to be approximately £12500 and men's goes from roughly £1000 up to £25000.

Santos, C. (2007). Estimating Linear Birth Cohort Effects. Revisiting the Age-Happiness Profile, Open Discussion Papers in Economics, 58, pp. 1-46. (first version released in October 2005)
This paper provides a simple way of accounting for linear birth cohort effects, together with linear age and calendar time effects. It relies on the discreteness of the data and on the fact that not all individuals are born/interviewed in the same day. This creates an exogenous source of age variation within the same cohort that breaks the linear dependence between the three variables. This method is applied to a happiness equation and shows that, once a linear birth cohort term is included in the regression equation, together with linear age and calendar time terms, the robustly found U-shape profile of happiness in age disappears.

Carneiro, P. and Santos, C. (2007). Estimating Age-Earnings Profiles: Accounting for Selective Employment and Attrition.
This paper estimates age-earnings profiles in the PSID, accounting for nonrandom attrition and selection into employment. We estimate fixed-effects log-wage equations accounting for skill, age and calendar time. Wages are then imputed for the non-employed and the non-interviewed workers using the predicted wages from these regressions. Results show the selection corrected profile is lower than the observed profile, even though the differences may not be significant due to the fact that the proportion of non-workers is small, in particular at earlier ages. At later ages, the wage difference between workers and non-workers shrinks for most groups. Attritors tend to be the highest-earners for women whereas the observed workers are the highest-earners for men.

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.