Katharina Fietz

Katharina Fietz is a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and a doctoral student in the GIGA Doctoral Program, where she focuses on globalization and development. She is also a consultant for the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs unit for Latin America. Her research centers on labor markets, social protection systems, and development economics, with a regional focus on Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil.

• PhD candidate, GIGA Doctoral Program
• Research Fellow, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)
• Consultant, World Bank – Social Protection and Jobs, Latin America
• Former Research Analyst and Fellow, World Bank (2019–2021)
• Teaching experience at Georg-August-University Göttingen

Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor economics and development policy, including informal employment, conditional cash transfers, digitalization of labor markets, and racial dynamics in the workplace. She investigates how social protection programs like Brazil's Bolsa Familia interact with local labor market conditions and how digital technologies are reshaping employment in the Global South.

Her recent publications analyze experimental interventions to formalize employment in African SMEs, the impact of local job growth on welfare program exits in Brazil, and racial peer effects using worker mortality shocks. These works reflect a strong empirical approach using quasi-experimental and experimental methods in development economics.

• Racial Peer Effects at Work: Evidence from Worker Deaths in Brazil (2024)
• Does Local Employment Growth Accelerate Exits from Social Assistance? (2024)
• Formalizing Employment in Africa's Small Firms (2025)
• Digitalization and Labor Markets in Developing Countries (2023)
• Digital Skills in the Global South (2023)

Katharina Fietz has contributed expert commentary in media outlets such as WDR5 and Deutschlandfunk NOVA on Brazilian politics and social divisions. She has presented her research at major international conferences including the SITES-GLO Annual Conference, the International Conference on Development Economics, and the NOVAFRICA Conference.

She has taught the course 'Controversies in Development Economics' at Georg-August-University Göttingen in 2022 and 2023. Her academic training includes an M.Sc. in Economics from the Nova School of Business and Economics (Portugal) and ITAM (Mexico), and a B.Sc. in Business Administration from Humboldt University of Berlin and the Higher School of Economics (Russia). She began her doctoral studies at GIGA in July 2021, focusing on social protection and decent jobs in informal labor markets.