Andrea Atencio De Leon

Andrea Atencio is an applied macroeconomist pursuing an Economics PhD at the University of Illinois. Before joining the University of Illinois, she worked at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. At these institutions, Atencio’s research mostly focused on the implications of legal and social institutions on the gender wage gap in countries over the whole spectrum of development.

More recently, Atencio has studied the role of domestic outsourcing on the decline of labor market fluidity that the U.S. has experienced in the last few decades. In particular, she has quantified how much of the observed drop in worker reallocations can be attributed to domestic outsourcing; this research adds labor fluidity indicators to the list of measurement issues that we can incur for not accounting for outsourced workers. Her current research focuses on how domestic outsourcing has altered the labor responsiveness of businesses to productivity shocks. Atencio’s other research investigates labor market frictions in developing economies and the relationship between recruitment effort, firm growth, and aggregate productivity.