Research Bio

Maria Carreri is a political scientist working on political economy and local politics. She studies local politicians and the local institutions that constrain their actions, and seeks to answer two sets of questions: i) What is the impact of local elected officials for service delivery, local public finance, and the distribution of resources within communities? ii) How do local institutions impact the way in which elected officials affect these outcomes? She tackles these questions using causal inference methods in quasi-experimental settings, leveraging a combination of original surveys, newly digitized historical data and administrative data, across Italy, Colombia and the U.S.

Carreri's research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Political Science Research and Methods, and the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. More work is at the revise and resubmit stage with the Journal of the European Economic Association. Her work has received several recognitions, including the Michael Wallerstein Best Paper Award by the Political Economy section of the American Political Science Association. She is the recipient of the Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award from the APSA Urban Politics Section. 

Prior to joining the Goldman School, Carreri was an Assistant Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. She obtained her Ph.D. from New York University’s Department of Politics and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management.

Research Expertise and Interest

political economy, local politics, political economy or comparative political economy, local public finance, bureaucracy