Ferrán Vega Carol

Ph.D. Student, Public Policy

Ferrán is a public policy PhD student with a concentration in economics. His interests are development economics and the economics of the energy transition, with intersections with labor and gender economics. Prior to Duke, Ferrán graduated with a BA in Economics from University College Utrecht; worked on field research in Ghana, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone on a combination of RCTs and lab-in-the-field experiments on topics including the role of social networks for innovation and entrepreneurship or the impact of intrahousehold labor allocation on women’s bargaining power; graduated with a MSc in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford; and spent a couple more years there after graduating studying productivity determinants in the Bangladeshi garment sector.

His ongoing projects focus mainly on improvements in energy access and reliability and the promotion of a fair energy transition. In particular, he is interested in studying technological innovations that engage communities to raise the quality of service in mini-grids and improve their financial sustainability, understanding the role of women’s aspirations for the overall and distributional impacts of energy access, and evaluating and improving the design of green transition policies such as retraining programs. He is also part of a project helping design and evaluate a large-scale national intervention for the reduction of intimate partner violence in Peru.