Welcome to my personal webpage.
I’m a PhD economist with over 17 years of experience specializing on the analysis and evaluation of labor market and social policies. I currently lead the Skills, Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), and Policy Evaluation Unit in the Research Department of the International Labour Organization (ILO), based in Geneva, Switzerland. I am also currently in charge of the ILO’s organization-wide Flagship Report on Lifelong Learning and Skills for the Future, scheduled for launch in May 2026.
From March 2021 to January 2023, I served as Visiting Scholar with the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California Berkeley. I am a fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO).
Here you can find my CV, my IDEAS/RePEc profile, my official bio, and details on how to contact me or connect with me on social media.
My research is divided around two broad, policy-relevant areas:
The effectiveness of labor market and social protection policies, and
Skills dynamics and work-to-work transitions.
In the first area, my work focuses on identifying effective active labor market and social protection policies to improve job quality and social conditions, with the objective of informing national policy design. I study how program design and delivery features shape policy effectiveness, and how complementarities across policies can amplify their impacts.
In the second area, I examine the skills required for successful transitions to decent work in low- and middle-income countries, using large-scale online data from job vacancies and applications collected from labour market platforms. My research contributes to advancing methods to measure skills using big data, including digital and green skills, and to identify the skills and skill bundles that foster upward job transitions. I also analyze how skill demand evolves in response to global shocks and structural transformations.
Throughout this website, you will find information on my professional background, research agenda, publications, and the evidence-based policy projects I have led and managed.
What’s new?
📌 Accepted for publication in the WBER:
Escudero, V. “Workfare programs and their delivery system: Effectiveness of Construyendo Perú”.
This solo-authored paper has been accepted for publication in the World Bank Economic Review. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and three comprehensive databases, it evaluates the medium- to long-term effects of the workfare program Construyendo Perú, highlighting heterogeneous employment outcomes and the central role of program design in shaping job quality.
📌 New methodological briefs — measuring skills, job quality, and the green transition with big data
Measuring the Greenness of Jobs in Emerging Economies: A Big Data Text Analysis Approach
This research brief introduces a scalable method combining big data and NLP to identify green tasks and measure the greenness of jobs across countries, with a focus on skills requirements, wages, and working conditions.
Measuring Quality of Employment in Emerging Economies: A Methodology for Assessing Job Amenities Using Big Data
This methodological brief develops a novel framework to measure non-wage job amenities using online vacancy data, enabling new analyses of job quality and decent work beyond wages in job vacancy data.
🎧 Podcast — big data and the future of work
I participated in the ILO podcast “Big data: What it is, what it does, and how it impacts work”, discussing how big data can be leveraged to analyse labor markets, skills demand, and policy challenges.
About me
Find out about my professional background and the focus and aim of my research program.
research & policy projects
Take a look at my research work and find out about the evidence-based policy projects I’ve managed.
columns & blogs
A list of research-based policy analysis and commentary that I’ve published in various outlets.