Andreu Arenas

Andreu Arenas is an Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona currently on leave while serving as Senior Quantitative Analyst at Ivàlua. He maintains active research affiliations as a Research Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB), where he co-directs the Political Economy Program, and at the Institutions and Political Economy Research Center (IPERC). Previously, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at CORE (UCLouvain) and was a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University's Bobst Center and Politics Department.

His research spans public economics, political economy, comparative politics, and the economics of education/social mobility, with strong methodological focus on causal inference and quantitative analysis. Recent work examines pandemic education impacts (showing 25% mathematics learning loss equivalent to one school year), democratic resilience during crises, gender differences in high-stakes testing, and intergenerational mobility mechanisms. His publications appear in premier journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, and Economic Journal, demonstrating interdisciplinary reach across political science, economics, and education policy.

Arenas' publication record reveals consistent output in top-tier journals since 2016, with increasing focus on contemporary policy challenges like pandemic education disruption and democratic stability. His work combines experimental, quasi-experimental, and large-scale observational methods, often featuring multi-country collaborations. The 2021-2025 publications show particular emphasis on education policy responses to crises and methodological transparency in social science research.

His doctoral training at the European University Institute (PhD in Economics, 2016) established foundations for his current research program, with subsequent positions at Princeton and UCLouvain expanding his methodological toolkit and policy relevance. Current work in progress includes projects on public health valuation, researcher variation in economics, and analytical robustness in social sciences.

Arenas actively collaborates with major research institutions including ISEI-IVEI (Basque educational evaluation) and contributes to policy discussions through reports like the IEB Report 4/2023 on education quality and equality. His work directly informs educational recovery strategies following pandemic disruptions, particularly regarding mathematics instruction and socio-emotional support systems. The learning loss study he co-authored has shaped educational policy discussions across Spain's autonomous communities through its documentation of differential impacts by school type and student characteristics.