In this episode of Brazilian Women in Economics’s podcast, Paula Pereda and Laura Karpuska interviewed Cristine Pinto. She took her bachelor’s in Economics, her master’s in Statistics from PUC-Rio, and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Berkeley. She is currently a professor at Getúlio Vargas Foundation, in São Paulo.

Cristine talked about her professional choice, made when she was in high school: from an early age, she already had an interest in quantitative methods. During her undergraduate studies, working at a bank was important. However, what most delighted her was being a research assistant. After she had finished the undergraduate course, she moved to Rio de Janeiro for the master in PUC-Rio. In this context, she began to question the lack of Theoretical Economics in undergraduate Economics courses, although she initially prefers the applied research.

Nevertheless, when you work with data, is essential to understand that theory comes before the instrumental, according to Cristine. The hypothesis comes from the theory. What hypothesis do I want to test? The researcher states that data science and evaluation of policies for support managers have been utilized to figure out the causality of a phenomenon.

The economist also talked about synthetic control literature, a method created by an econometrist that worked with dealt unities. As an example, it could be used to find out the number of deaths caused by smoking in California. Through this method, it has been possible to establish a control group and simulate a synthetic unity (all the American states). Nowadays, there are methods that combine synthetic control with other ones, like differences and indifference, which results in a more robust method in terms of a causal effect, she said.

Cristine also discussed the importance of soft skills, responsible for individual and collective well-being. As they are more flexible, what would be their impacts? How can we measure them? It is known that there is a positive impact on the labor market: people with these skills receive better salaries, have higher occupations, and fewer risk behaviors. About this, she mentions her research about soft skills in educational programs.

In conclusion, our guest talked about mentorship for women in undergraduate and graduate studies. According to her, there are still few women in Economics, and this is the reason why is important to stimulate a propitious environment for women in this field. In relation to her personal trajectory, Cristine remembers that because of her daring, she didn’t think much about inequality gender problems.

Listen to the full episode here (available only in Brazilian Portuguese):