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   (Job Market Paper (Draft coming soon!))

    Presented @  XXVIII Workshop on dynamic macroeconomics — Universidad de Vigo ; 2025 QED Jamboree — Universitat Bielefeld ; EAYE Annual Meeting 2026 — University of the Basque Country

    This paper studies how childbirth affects women’s occupational choices in a developing country with informality. 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 8 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 closely 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. Entrepreneurial ability is enhanced by college education. Calibrated to Brazil, the model shows that expanding college attainment reduces informality by reallocating talent toward larger, more productive formal firms. This raises GDP and aggregate productivity, with the magnitude of effects depending on the degree of credit frictions. We validate the mechanism using microdata, leveraging Brazil’s 1996 education reform. The findings underscore the role of education in promoting formalization.

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