Backstory: Fulvia Budillon on Facility Birth and Early-Life Mortality in Malawi

Riccardo talks to Fulvia Budillon, a PhD candidate in Economics at UC San Diego currently on the job market. Fulvia discusses the backstory of her job market paper, “Beyond Access: Facility Birth, Healthcare Use and Early-Life Mortality in Malawi.”The conversation begins in the field, where Fulvia—through qualitative work, conversations, and failed attempts—arrives at her current research question and identification strategy. It then moves to the “middle stage” of the process: dataset construction, cleaning, and working with large administrative data. Finally, it circles back to the field, which is part of the reason Fulvia is drawn to development and health topics: behind the data she studies are real people whose health is shaped in meaningful ways by the circumstances they live in.You can find the link to Fulvia’s paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yCLMf3jxV-1gEMX5C_4h2TUeKSNVw9G-/viewTo learn more about our wonderful candidate, you can visit her website: https://www.fulviabudillon.com/home-page