mar c. espadafor
ENES

How can we reduce inequality through research and policy?

Research areas Publications
About

I work at the intersection of inequality research and strategic foresight — using causal designs to find where advantage is transmitted, and building the data and scenarios that let institutions act before it consolidates.

From Almería, one of the sunniest cities in Europe.

Now

Deputy Director at the Directorate for Public Policy, Presidency of the Government of Spain. I coordinate a cross-ministerial team and lead the analytical work behind priority reforms: the 2026 extraordinary regularisation, the Plan de Integración y Ciudadanía, and the organic law on minors in digital environments.

Before

Senior Policy Analyst at the National Office of Foresight & Strategy, where I built the three instruments that now power my research: Generaciones del Futuro, HispanIA 2040 and Country Compass.

Trained

PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, with Fabrizio Bernardi. Postdoc at UNED within MapIneq, Research Fellow at INVEST (Turku), Visiting Scholar at Wisconsin–Madison. I teach causal inference at RECSM (UPF) every summer.

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You can see my full CV here CV (PDF)

Latest

Recent publications

All publications

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The engine

Who gets exposed, and who pays?

Rawls imagined two lotteries: the lottery of birth — who your parents are — and the lottery of life, the shocks along the way. Sociology shows they are rigged together. The first lottery decides both who gets exposed to the second and who pays when it hits. My research measures that rigging causally, and asks what policy can do about it.

Prevalence

Selection into risk

Is a disadvantage more common among children of low-status families because of their origin — or because of who ends up there? Identified through traits exogenous to family background, such as sex or month of birth, and through institutional rules.

Penalty

Moderation of the penalty

When the shock lands, do advantaged families absorb it — compensatory advantage — or convert it into a wider edge? And through which mechanism: expectations, information, time, money?

Theory evaluation

Evaluation, not one coefficient

Each theory is turned into several observable implications, confronted with rivals and with data, and judged on substantive size, robustness and mechanism — not on a single significant estimate.

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Nothing in the engine is specific to education. Any stratified risk — a legal status, a technology, an environment — fits the same template.

The framework comes out of my doctoral thesis, Selection or moderation? (European University Institute, 2023), where I tested it on three shocks: grade retention in Spain, boyhood in the United Kingdom and school entry age in Germany. Read the thesis.

01 Research area 01 / 04

Educational inequalities

Family origin still shapes who makes it through school — but not everywhere, and rarely through the channels we assume. I use causal designs to locate the moments at which education systems either transmit advantage or interrupt it.

Selected work
02 Research area 02 / 04

Work & labour markets

Automation, AI and credential rules are redrawing who works, at what, and for how much. I study who is exposed to that restructuring at labour-market entry, and for whom exposure turns into a wage or mobility penalty.

Selected work
03 Research area 03 / 04

Institutions & public policy

Welfare states, school systems, cities and legal status are the machinery that distributes opportunity. I work on both sides of the evidence: producing it, and using it inside the Presidency of the Government of Spain.

Selected work
04 Research area 04 / 04

Foresight & indicators

Inequality that is not measured cannot be governed. I build the cohort data, the indicators and the scenarios that let institutions see inequality forming — years before it shows up in the outcomes we usually track.

FORTHCOMING

  • EPOCH-ES, released as an open dataset
  • A listening pipeline for administrative processes
  • New ways of building country indicators
See what is coming
Drawing of a graveyard; the central headstone reads "she was super productive".