A network of High School friendships coloured by ethnicity from the book 'Social and Economic Networks' by Matthew Jackson. A network of High School friendships coloured by ethnicity from the book 'Social and Economic Networks' by Matthew Jackson.

Research

I am a development economist combining field experiments, network analysis, and machine learning to study human capital investment in low and middle-income countries. My work examines how social networks shape educational aspirations, how families allocate resources among children, and how to optimally distribute scarce healthcare resources.

Research interests: education economics, healthcare, network science, mechanism design, machine learning for policy.

Publications

Learning in low and middle-income countries: essays on education and development economics link
Michelle González Amador.
Doctoral Thesis, Maastricht University, 2024
Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing arXiv
Exemplary Track Paper Award - Applied Modeling
Simon Finster, Michelle González Amador, Edwin Lock, Francisco Marmolejo-Cossío, Evi Micha, and Ariel D. Procaccia.
Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'23), Submitted: Operations Research 2023
Youth aspirations and the future of work link
Drew Gardiner, Micheline Goedhuys, and Michelle González Amador.
Book Chapter. In: Is the future ready for youth? International Labour Organization, Geneva, 2021

Working Papers

Malleability of Educational Aspirations: A Networked Field Experiment in 45 Mexican High Schools arXiv
Michelle González Amador, Robin Cowan, and Eleonora Nillesen.
Working Paper, Submitted: Economics of Education Review
IAC: A Framework for Enabling Patient Agency in the Use of AI-Enabled Healthcare arXiv
Chinasa T. Okolo and Michelle González Amador.
Working Paper, Submitted: ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Special Issue: The Ethics of Medical AI)
Fighting the Learning Loss: Evaluating C-SEF for University Students and Staff link
Simon Finster, Michelle González Amador, Edwin Lock, Francisco Marmolejo-Cossío, and Stefania Merone.
Working Paper, Analysis phase
Parental Preferences and Educational Inequality: Evidence from Mexico link
Michelle González Amador and Esther Gehrke.
Field Experiment, Data collection phase
Machine Learning and Tax Base in Developing Countries
Michelle González Amador and Rose Vincent.
Work in Progress
Willingness to Donate in an Emergency: From the Global North to the Global South
Simon Finster, Michelle González Amador, and Edwin Lock.
Work in Progress
Educational Resilience in Times of Crisis: State policies, aggregate shocks and students' educational resilience in Peru
Michelle González Amador.
Work in Progress

Grants & Awards

Exemplary Track Paper Award
24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 2024
Awarded for 'Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing' (Applied Modeling track)
DUS-I International Collaborative Virtual Project Grant €15,000
Dutch Ministry of Education, 2023-2024
Principal Investigator for 'Machine Learning for Public Policy'

Press & Media

Supporting indigenous women researchers to flourish link
UNU-MERIT — Summer of Science Program
Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing link
SIGecom Exchanges — ACM Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation

Full CV