Carolina

Ivonne

Cardona Cabrera

,

PhD

Dr. Cardona is a health economist focused on understanding demographic processes and their effect on economic development. She is particularly interested in the influence of women’s sexual and reproductive health decisions on women’s roles in society and how they shape demographic transitions. To date, her work has investigated these areas in the context of developing countries from sub-Saharan Africa and in the U.S. context. Much of her research relies on data collected by the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) project to study contraceptive behaviors and family planning preferences using two types of data: 1) clients of reproductive age seeking healthcare services, and 2) women of reproductive age surveyed at their household. She is also interested in understanding how government spending influences women’s sexual and reproductive health decisions and other population health outcomes. Her work in this area has relied on U.S. data. To date, she has looked at the influence of social spending of local governments on life expectancy at birth and COVID-19. She has also analyzed spending trends across different U.S. welfare programs.

Dr. Cardona has also devoted much research to understanding how demographic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa can spark economic growth. She has co-developed a tool to track the efforts placed by governments in setting a favorable policy environment that could allow countries to harness a demographic dividend. In this capacity, she is the technical coordinator of the Demographic Dividend Initiative at the Gates Institute at JHSPH.