Her dissertation, Three Essays on Empirical Methods for Evaluating the Impact of Policy Interventions in Education and Training, was jointly supervised by James Heckman, Hidehiko Ichimura, and Derek Allen Neal.
She recently finished a book manuscript Impact Evaluation in Developing Countries: Theory, Methods and Practice, coauthored with Paul Glewwe, that will be published by the World Bank in 2020.
[5] She was an expert consultant in designing the Mexican Progresa experiment (later called Oportunidades) that randomized 506 rural villages in or out of a conditional transfer program.
Experimental evidence on the effectiveness of Progresa in increasing schooling and improving health was important to the adoption of similar anti-poverty programs in more than 60 countries around the world (Parker & Todd 2017).
Petra Todd also played a key role in the design of the ALI experiment in Mexico that randomized 88 high schools to a student and teacher incentive program that paid for improvement on mathematics curriculum tests.
Todd also some recent published papers that analyze the role of personality traits in educational and working decisions and in time allocation of husbands and wives.