Dr
Maria
Petrillo
Faculty of Social Sciences
Research Associate
Full contact details
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Wave
- Profile
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Maria Petrillo is a Research Associate at the Centre for Care, University of Sheffield, specialising in applied economics and quantitative social research. Her work focuses on labour market inequalities, wage determination, and the economics of unpaid care, using advanced quasi-experimental and multilevel methods to understand how socio-economic and health inequalities shape caregiving experiences and outcomes across places and over time.
Maria leads and co-develops data-driven policy tools, including the Unpaid Care Dashboard, and co-directs the . She is an ONS Accredited Researcher, an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), and collaborates widely across academia, government, and the third sector to ensure research translates into meaningful policy impact.
She completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Sheffield, funded by the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and holds degrees in Economics and Public Policy from the University of York and the Second University of Naples. Before joining the Centre for Care, Maria taught Microeconomics, Statistics, and Econometrics at the Universities of Sheffield and Hallam.
- Research interests
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- Labour Economics
- Economics of Education
- Gender Economics
- Applied Microeconometrics
- Quantitative and quasi-experimental methods
- Publications
Petrillo, M., Zhang, J., Pryce, G., & Bennett, M. (2026). Who Cares? Exploring the Socio-Economic Dynamics of Informal Caregiving Trajectories in England. Social Science & Medicine,
Petrillo, M., Rodrigues, R., Bennett, M., & Pryce, G. (2026). The Gendered Landscape of Informal Caregiving: Cohort Effects and Socioeconomic Inequalities in England. Social Science & Medicine, 119052.
Zhang, J., Petrillo, M., Bennett, M. R., & Pryce, G. (2026). Declining demands or constraining supply? Explaining the trend of care home entry in England 2001-2021. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, gbag104.
Petrillo, M., Valdenegro, D., Rahal, C., Zhang, Y., Pryce, G. and Bennett, M.R., 2024. Estimating the cost of informal care with a novel two-stage approach to individual synthetic control.
Petrillo, M., 2022. Variation in Parenthood Wage Effect: A human capital approach (No. 037). Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Reports
Petrillo, M. and Bennett, M., 2023. Valuing Carers 2021: England and Wales
Zhang, J., Petrillo, M. and Bennett, M., 2023. Valuing Carers 2021: Northern Ireland.
Zhang, J., Petrillo, M. and Bennett, M., 2024. Valuing Carers 2022: Scotland.
Petrillo, M., Zhang, J. and Bennett, M., 2024. Valuing Carers 2021/2022: the value of unpaid care in the UK.
Petrillo, M., Bennett, M.R. and Pryce, G., 2022. Cycles of caring: transitions in and out of unpaid care.
Petrillo, M., Zhang, J., Driscoll, B. and Hughes, N., 2025. Valuing Kinship Care in England.
Dashboard
Petrillo, M., Siddall, T., and Bennett, M. (2025). Unpaid Care Dashboard. Centre for Care. Available at:
Work in progress
The causal impacts of social frontiers on mental health and wellbeing: Identifying the challenges and potential solutions (with Duncan Lee, Gwilym Pryce and Miguel Ramos, working paper available on request)
Parenthood Wage Effects in Germany: Evidence from a Two-Stage Individual Synthetic Control Approach (with Daniel Valdenegro)
Estimating local intergenerational social mobility: carers versus non-cares in England and Wales (with Franz Buscha, Emma Gorman and Gwilym Pryce)
Does the education type and the educational orientation of the country impact the gender wage gap? (working paper available on request)
Is this really a man’s world? The effect of vertical and horizontal segregation in the UK (working paper available on request)
Links