Beatrice Montano is a Ph.D. candidate in political science, specializing in comparative politics and political economy.
Her research focuses on the behavioral political economy of social norms, with a particular emphasis on gender-based violence. By examining the political mechanisms that sustain these norms, her work identifies new pathways for shaping political behavior. She combines experimental and causal-inference methods on original large-scale data with fieldwork-based insights in the context of global development.
Ms. Montano’s research has been published in The Journal of Politics and Comparative Political Studies. Her work has been supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, and Columbia University Libraries, among others. In 2023, she was named runner-up in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Gender Fellows program.
Before joining Columbia, Ms. Montano earned a B.S. and an M.S. in economics and social sciences from Bocconi University. She also worked with the Research and Evaluation Unit of BRAC Uganda and at the Marshall Institute at the London School of Economics.
