Mireia Borrell-Porta

Mireia joined the department as a Post-doctoral Research Officer in Family Policy in October 2015. She is working on a research project aiming to expand the evidence base for family policy and developing a conceptual framework to take account of both the changing nature of family policy and the available evidence. The project is headed by Professor Mary Daly (PI) and funded by the John Fell Fund.

Mireia completed her PhD in European Political Economy at the European Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE). Prior to this she received an MSc in European Political Economy by the same institution and a BSc in Economics by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF).

Mireia’s main research interests focus on the impact of family policy on individuals’ decisions to care and work and on the relationship between social norms and individual behaviour. Her PhD thesis analysed the extent to which the effects of family values on individual behaviour are resilient to changes in economic incentives (title: ‘The limits of economic convergence in the EU: the interplay between family values and economic incentives in shaping individual behaviour in social care’).

Mireia has used a range of quantitative methods in her research and has experience using large-scale survey data such as the British Household Panel Data and Understanding Society, the German Socio-economic Panel, the Millenium Cohort Study, Eurobarometer, the British Social Attitudes Survey and the European Values Study.

She is also working on other research projects at the LSE involving the analysis of the stability of social norms over the life cycle (undertaken under the Communities Project at the Centre for Economic Performance) and the examination of the effect of parental socio-economic factors on their children’s social preferences (undertaken at the Department of Social Policy).