Biography
Laura was enrolled in the PhD program at the Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg. Her areas of interest included development, public policy, environmental and labor economics. Laura also collaborated with the Environment for Development Network (EfD initiative) and she was in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge as a visiting scholar.
Laura investigated the effects of weather variation on human capital. Do bad weather conditions increase school absenteeism? To what extend absenteeism impacts academic performance? Those were the questions Laura addressed as part of her dissertation. She had also worked on the environmental and social impacts of forest conservation policies. For example, she had looked at the effects of protected areas, such as national parks, on local communities' wages. She had also worked with the evaluation of the effects of the Payments for Environmental Services in Costa Rica and Forest Certification Labels in Sweden. Other topics that called her attention included the behavioral aspects of environmental risk communication, spatial and behavioral modelling of vector transmitted diseases, and energy policies. She graduated from the Department of Economics at the University of Costa Rica, and holds a Master degree on Environmental Economics from the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center, Turrialba, Costa Rica.
