cv

This page contains my cv information.

Basics

Name Matías Villalba Ortega
Label Economist
Email matias.villalba.ortega@gmail.com
Phone +1(213)313-0998
Url https://mvillalbao.github.io
Summary Graduated from Universidad del Pacífico with a Bachelor's degree in Economics, advised by Professors Alberto Chong and Edgar Castro on a thesis examining the impact of COVID-19 policies on the efficiency of public procurement. Passionate about academia and research, with interests in development economics, machine learning, and applied microeconomics.

Work

  • 2025.03 - Present

    Remote

    Consultancy in Data Analysis for Fiscal Program Evaluations
    Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
    Ongoing consultancy with the Fiscal Management Division (IFD/FMM), conducting data analysis to support the impact evaluation of multiple fiscal programs across the LAC region.
  • 2023.09 - 2024.12

    Lima, Perú

    Research Assistant to Manuel Barrón
    Research Center of Universidad del Pacífico (CIUP)
    Led the implementation of a randomized control trial assessing the impacts of homophily in student social networks.
    • Designed and executed baseline and endline surveys using SurveyCTO.
    • Performed data cleaning and analysis of administrative datasets (+250k observations) using Python and Stata.
    • Prepared publication-quality tables in LaTeX, and developed informative data visualizations.
  • 2023.02 - 2025.01

    Remote

    Research Assistant to Edgar Castro
    Independent
    Worked on multiple concurrent projects in political economy, primarily focusing on impact evaluation studies analyzing the effects of COVID-19 policies in Colombia and Chile.
    • Processed and analyzed large-scale government datasets (2M+ observations) using Python and Stata.
    • Implemented web-scraping, OCR pipelines, and fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for data extraction.
    • Recognized as co-author on multiple papers due to significant contributions; continued collaboration post-employment.

Education

  • 2022.02 - 2025.05
    MicroMaster Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
    • Data Analysis for Social Scientists
    • Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations
    • Microeconomics
    • Foundations of Development Policy
    • Political Economy and Economic Development
  • 2017.03 - 2024.06
    Bsc in Economics
    Universidad del Pacífico
    • Causal Inference and ML
    • Machine Learning for Economists
    • Econometrics II
    • Mathematics IV

Languages

Spanish
Native speaker
English
Advanced, TOEFL iBT 108/120