Ana Paula Melo

Ana Paula Melo is a Ph.D. student in Agriculture and Applied Economics at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on education policies and social inequality. Ana obtained her Maters in Economics at the University of Sao Paulo. Before joining UW-Madison, she worked at an organization focused on using scientific evidence to inform public education policy. In her Ph.D. thesis, Ana studies how affirmative action policy in college promotes equality of opportunity. With the Scott Kloeck-Jenson fellowship, she will obtain detailed data to explore the policy’s targeting and the student’s trajectory within a particular university in Brazil. In another project, she analyzes how the Brazilian quotas impact pre-college investments in human capital, using national public data. These two pieces of research will provide countrywide and detailed local evidence on the private and social returns of a large-scale AA program, which is relevant not only to Brazil but to the many other countries with such initiatives.

Read Ana Paula Melo’s report here.