Lelys Dinarte-Diaz

At-risk Youth, Crime and Welfare

Combining experimental and non-experimental approaches, one strand of Lelys Dinarte-Diaz’s research agenda studies how educational interventions implemented in developing countries can modify at-risk youth wellbeing, including academic performance, socio-emotional skills, mental health, and violent behaviors. In a second strand of her agenda, Ms. Dinarte-Diaz also empirically analyzes the interaction between crime and welfare, noting how criminal organizations usually harm countries’ economic growth path. She also studies interventions that aim to improve parental skills and to reduce child maltreatment and abuse in developing countries.

Lelys Dinarte-Diaz’s primary research fields are development economics and economics of education, with a focus on violence and crime. During her visit at CESifo, she will work on some papers related to the third strand of her research agenda – parenting interventions oriented to reduce child maltreatment and abuse in El Salvador and Colombia. These are joint projects with Sofia Amaral and Pablo Kolb, CESifo affiliates. Lelys Dinarte has built original datasets from the ground up, by combining datasets from administrative and geographic records, with primary data collected by herself and coauthors using state-of-the-art tools from (neuro)psychology. She has additional ongoing joint research projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, Ecuador, and Ukraine.

Lelys Dinarte-Diaz is a research economist in the Human Development Team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. She obtained her PhD and Master in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 2018 and 2016, respectively. She holds a BA in Economics from ESEN in El Salvador, the country in which she was born and raised.