Isabel Micó

ISABEL MICÓ MILLÁN joined the Structural Analysis and Microeconomic Studies Department at the Banco de España in September 2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Prior to his doctoral studies, Isabel obtained two M.Sc. in Economics, from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Universidad of Valencia.

Isabel is an empirical microeconomist with broad research interests in household financial, public finance and taxation. She has recently published her work on the sentimental propagation of regional income shocks, coauthored with Morteza Ghomi and Evi Pappa, in the Journal of Monetary Economics.

In her recent paper “The Effects of Inheritance Taxes on Wealth Mobility”, she studies the effects of inheritance taxes on heirs’ wealth mobility. By exploiting rich regional variation in tax rates in Spain and household wealth survey data, she provides evidence that taxes reduce bottom wealth mobility through lower financial wealth and higher debt accumulation of bottom-wealth heirs. In an ongoing and related project, she studies inheritance tax-minimizing strategies of wealthy individuals by exploiting a salient tax reform and exhaustive administrative data from Catalonia.

In a second paper, “Female Financial Portfolio Choice and Martial Property Regime”, (with Lidia Cruces and Susana Párraga), a paper for which she received the award “Premio de Investigación y Estudio Antonio Dionis Soler 2023”, she explores how marital property regimes shape financial portfolio of couples. Using rich household data and regional variation in default marital property regimes in Spain, the paper finds that separate-property couples hold riskier financial portfolios than community-property ones when wives are the most knowledgeable about household finances.