Almudena Sevilla is a Professor in Economics and Public Policy at UCL, and fellow of the Centre of Time Use Research at the University of Oxford. She has also held positions at Queen Mary University, University of Oxford, University of Essex Institute for Social and Economic Research, and the Congressional Budget Office in Washington DC. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2004 in the fields of family and population economics and econometrics. Almudena is an applied micro economist whose research focuses on the areas of gender, child development and human capital. She teaches courses in these areas at the Graduate and Undergraduate Level.

Almudena’s current project, PARENTIME, has received Eur. 2M funding from the European Union as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant (2018-2022). The objective of PARENTIME is to develop new socio-economic theories that unpack the detailed mechanisms driving the inter-generational transmission of inequality. High socio-economic status parents consistently produce high socio-economic status children. The question is how. Because of data limitations and theoretical traditions, the literature has focused on a narrow conceptualization of parental time (limited to the quantity of time spent with children in different kinds of activities), and a narrow set of child outcomes (limited to educational outcomes and socio-behavioral outcomes during the early years). Thus, while the results from this literature are informative at documenting the phenomenon of inter-generational transmission of human capital, they remain silent about the mechanisms underlying the process. PARENTIME aims to close this gap. PARENTIME takes a theoretically-driven Big Data approach by linking large representative 24-hour diary survey data of parents and children with very comprehensive and detailed information on child outcomes from administrative data to: First, go beyond the quantity of parental time to explore the inter-connections between family members and their role in the child’s acquisition of human capital (i.e., the timing and sequence, co-presence, multi-tasking, and instantaneous parental enjoyment). Second, establish long-term effects of parental time investments by looking at a comprehensive set of child human capital measures all the way into the child’s adult life. Third, arrive at a well-coordinated scientific approach, starting at the micro-sequential level of parents and children’s everyday life and building progressively to a macro understanding of the (re)production of socio-economic inequality.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in May 2012.