Catia Batista

This profile was current as of 2018, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Catia Batista (PhD, University of Chicago), a 2017–18 Kellogg visiting fellow, is associate professor in economics at Portugal’s Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she is cofounder and scientific director of the NOVAFRICA research center. Her research includes randomized and lab-in-the-field experiments on topics related to international migration and remittance flows, mobile money, entrepreneurship, and technology adoption in both Africa and Europe.

While at Kellogg, Batista will focus on three projects related to migration between Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, seeking to better understand what drives highly educated migrants; how access to information affects poor Africans’ illegal migration choices; and if improving integration in host countries has positive consequences for immigrants and their families left behind. Her work is based on lab-in-the-field and field experiments in Cape Verde, the Gambia, Kenya, Mozambique, and Portugal.

Currently a research fellow at the international research centers CReAM (London, UK) and IZA (Bonn, Germany), Batista has taught at the University of Chicago, University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. Previously, she worked at the International Monetary Fund and Portuguese Catholic University and consulted for the World Bank and the International Growth Center. Her academic work has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and the World Bank Economic Review.