Valentina Melentyeva works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research at Tilburg University. She obtained her PhD in Economics at the University of Cologne. Prior to joining the University of Cologne, she was a PhD student at the University of Mannheim and worked as a researcher in the group “Inequality and Public Policy” at the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

Her research centers on labor economics, with a particular emphasis on inequality and applied econometrics. She focuses on developing and applying methods to measure and analyze sources of inequality and to conduct policy evaluations. Her work examines the labor market costs of motherhood, the impact of gender quotas, and the effectiveness of active labor market policies for disadvantaged youth.