Vanessa Cheng Matsuno

Vanessa is a second-year M/PhD student at the Department of Political Economy. She is interested in understanding civil servants and public employees, and how they influence and determine state capacity. This topic becomes more complex when the informal roles of politicians and bureaucrats overlap in practice. Vanessa is interested in understanding their underlying work dynamics and its implications for service delivery and public policy.

Previous to King’s, Vanessa was part of the World Bank’s Bureaucracy Lab in Washington, DC, an initiative that builds empirically-driven research for public administration reform in developing countries, using innovative surveys and analytical tools. She has also worked as a research assistant in other international organisations and research centres and has served as a civil servant for the Peruvian government at the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Production.

Vanessa has a solid training in quantitative methods and wishes to engage with experimental and quasi experimental methods in her research. She holds a master’s degree in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Pacífico.

Doctoral Research

Public Servants, Political Instability and Policy Outcomes

Research

• Political economy of the personnel of the State
• Cultural economics and institutions
• Experimental and quasi-experimental methods in the social sciences

Supervisors

Dr. Florian Foos    and    Dr. Rafael Hortala-Vallve

Teaching

• Comparing Political Systems
• Political Sociology of Social Networks
• Quantitative Methods for Political Economy