Isabela Mares is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York City. Her research has covered a wide range of topics in comparative social policy and comparative political economy, including the development of social insurance institutions, the effects of wage bargaining institutions on economic outcomes and social policy reform in developing countries. Isabela Mares is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003) which has won the Gregory Luebbert Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in Comparative Politics. Her second book, Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006) has examined how the growth in the tax burden and labor market outsiders has affected the economic performance of wage bargaining institutions. A recent set of articles have examined the political factors that account for recent adoption of non-contributory social policies in Latin American countries, the renationalizations of social insurance and the consequences of weakness of fiscal capacity for the political coalitions supporting different social policies in developing countries.