Catalina Herrera Almanza

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Catalina Herrera is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD in Applied Economics from Cornell University. Her main field of research is development economics, with a primary focus on the micro-econometric analysis of population, health and education issues in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America. As a Hewlett Foundation/IIE PhD Dissertation Fellow, she studied: i) the causal impact of teenage pregnancy on young women’s schooling and cognitive skills in Madagascar as well as the role of reproductive health policies in increasing female human capital; ii) the role of maternal cognitive ability in improving children’s health in Madagascar and iii) the childhood determinants of youth internal migration in Senegal. Catalina holds a B.A and M.A in Economics from  Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). She has worked for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, in Washington D.C., and the Public Policy Evaluation Directorate in Colombia’s Ministry of National Planning.