Adilya Abdrazakova

PhD Candidate in Economics at University of Alicante

Welcome to my personal website!

I am a PhD student at the University of Alicante and am on the 2026–2027 job market.

My research focuses on Macroeconomics, with a particular interest in gender and family macroeconomics, as well as development economics.

In 2026, I was a Summer Intern in the African Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). I have also worked as a consultant for the World Bank.

You can contact me through abdrazakovaa@gmail.com and adilya.abdrazakova@ua.es.

Research

Working Papers:

  • Informality, Children and Female Occupational Choice   Paper   (Job Market Paper)

    Presented @  XXVIII Workshop on dynamic macroeconomics — Universidad de Vigo ; 2025 QED Jamboree — Universitat Bielefeld ; EAYE Annual Meeting 2026 — University of the Basque Country ; Economic theory department seminar — University of Barcelona ; II Madrid Macro Mountain 2026 (poster session) ; Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía (SAEe) 2025 — Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ; 4ᵗʰ Milan PhD Economics Workshop — Bocconi University

    This paper studies how childbirth affects women’s occupational choices in a developing country with a large informal sector. Using Brazilian data, I show that childbirth lowers women’s labor force participation and, among those who remain employed, raises transitions into informal entrepreneurship by 7.3 percentage points. Furthermore, I develop and calibrate a life-cycle occupational choice model with exogenous fertility, heterogeneity in wage and managerial ability, spousal earnings, and child-related time and monetary costs to interpret these patterns. Formal-sector frictions restrict both access to jobs and opportunities for part-time work. The model matches observed transitions in the data, and suggests that childbirth makes informal entrepreneurship more attractive because it allows mothers to reduce working hours with a less than proportional decline in earnings. As a result, expanding part-time options produces limited formalization, whereas improving access to formal jobs has a larger effect. Policy experiments with budget-neutral child transfers show that conditioning benefits on formal activity yields large formalization gains. A universal child allowance, however, delivers the largest ex ante welfare gains for entering cohorts, even though it increases informal entrepreneurship.

  • Entrepreneurial Human Capital and Firm Informality  with Luis Franjo , Francesco Turino   Slides   Paper   (Submitted)

    Presented @  Inequalities in low and middle income countries — EUI Interdisciplinary Research Cluster ; 48th Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía — SAEe ; 47th Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía — SAEe ; Policy Indicator Seminar — World Bank DECIG

    This paper studies how entrepreneurial human capital affects firm informality in developing economies. We develop a life-cycle general equilibrium model with endogenous education and occupational choice under limited tax enforcement and credit frictions, in which the labor-market and managerial-ability returns to college education are subject to mismatch risk. Calibrated to Brazil in 2003, the model shows that raising college attainment to the level reached by the country in 2012 reduces informality by reallocating talent toward larger and more productive formal firms, thereby increasing GDP and aggregate productivity. Strikingly, this aggregate decline masks a rise in informal entrepreneurship among the newly skilled themselves, as financial frictions can still make operating informally optimal at early stages of business creation; this residual informality disappears only once credit access improves alongside education. We provide empirical support for the mechanism using microdata, leveraging Brazil’s 1996 education reform.

  • Educational Mobility and Aggregate Productivity  with Joanne Tan , Bilal Tabti

    This paper studies how intergenerational educational mobility shapes economic development. Using subnational nightlight and intergenerational mobility data, we present empirical evidence that higher intergenerational mobility is associated with higher economic development. We then extend a Roy model of occupational choice, in which intergenerational mobility affects economic productivity and growth via two mechanisms - educational attainment and the allocation of talent to occupations. We then calibrate it to Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, allowing for within-country between-group heterogeneity. The gains from improving education and occupational opportunities depend on how they interact, and a country’s initial conditions. Our findings show that the aggregate consequences of educational mobility depend on both inherited educational disadvantage and the opportunities workers face after acquiring education. In countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, where educational attainment is low, increasing educational attainment generates the largest output gains. In South Africa, high occupational barriers limit the gains from increasing educational mobility and attainment.

  • Adolescent Fertility, Human Capital, and Public Finances  with Luis Franjo , Nicolas Roig   (Work in Progress)