Verónica Escudero is a Senior Economist at the International Labour Organization (ILO), where she leads the Skills, Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), and Policy Evaluation Team in the Research Department. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Paris School of Economics and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley from 2021 to 2023.
Her research focuses on the effectiveness of labour market and social protection policies, and on skills dynamics in labour markets. She develops and applies advanced microeconometric methods to evaluate policy impacts, with a particular focus on active labour market policies and their complementarities with social protection systems. A central strand of her work examines how policy design and implementation shape job quality and labour market outcomes, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Her work also involves adapting empirical methods to settings with limited or imperfect data, ensuring rigorous policy evaluation in data-constrained environments.
Her recent research explores work-to-work transitions and the role of skills in shaping labour market trajectories. Using large-scale online vacancy and applicant data, she constructs novel measures of skill demand and skill bundles to analyse how skills influence employment outcomes, wages and non-wage amenities, and job quality. This work also investigates how the twin transitions of digitalization and the green transformation are reshaping skill demand and labour markets, and how skills can mediate these effects.
Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and has also appeared in policy outlets such as VoxEU and ILO flagship reports. Her work consistently aims to generate evidence-based policy recommendations that inform national policy formulation and address complex social challenges. She has led the development of the ILO’s organization-wide Flagship Report on Lifelong Learning and Skills for the Future, to be launched in May 2026.
Verónica joined IZA as a Research Fellow in March 2026.
