Researcher Spotlight
Emma Aguila
Associate Economist
Emma Aguila is an Associate Economist at RAND. On May 9, 2008, she was awarded the first place in the Inter-American Award for Research on Social Security. The ceremony was held in Mexico City, where Emma was given her prize by the Director of the Mexican Social Security Institute, Juan Molinar Horcasitas. Her research interests include pension reforms, retirement behavior, adequacy of saving, non-contributory pension programs as a poverty alleviation policy, health and labor market dynamics, and social security coverage of migrants.
Emma is one of the founders of the recently created Center for Latin American Social Policy (CLASP). The aim of CLASP is to conduct research on Latin America and the Latin American population in the United States in the areas of aging, social determinants and consequences of health, saving for retirement, social security coverage, labor market dynamics, and migration. This center also provides a platform to design and evaluate social policy interventions aimed at improving the wellbeing of the population.
Emma, along with other RAND researchers and other experts in the field, is currently developing a social policy intervention in Mexico. The project consists of designing a non-contributory social security program for towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants and evaluating its impact on the welfare of residents 70 years or over. This is a unique project to test and understand the effects of non-contributory pension systems on the health and welfare of the elderly.
The design of the intervention employs a randomized design with treatment and control groups and measurements before and after the intervention. This is a joint project with the Government of the State of Yucatan, Mexico. The study follows both treatment and control groups over time to examine short- and longer-term effects. The evaluation is implemented with a computerized questionnaire that asks for a wide variety of socio-economic and demographic characteristics, expenditures on non-durable goods, family transfers, health status, physical functioning, anthropometrics, health care services of the elderly, social networks and social support, and care giving responsibilities. This is the first effort to conduct a complex survey in Spanish and Maya with bilingual interviewers.
Emma has a B.A. in Economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City, an M.Sc. in Economics from University College London (UCL), and a Ph.D. in Economics from UCL.
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