Mira Bierbaum holds a master's degree in Public Policy and Human Development from Maastricht Graduate School of Governance (MGSoG)/United Nations University (UNU) with a specialisation in Social Policy Design and Financing (MSc, 2012) and a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University. Her doctoral thesis, entitled New Mindsets to Innovate Activation, looked at the design of the Dutch social assistance scheme and activation policy (governed by the 2015 Participation Act), mainly from the point of view of the lived experiences of recipients and with particular emphasis on their relative position in society, and combining both qualitative and experimental methods.

Mira has experience with poverty and vulnerability assessments and the assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of social protection systems using large household data sets. She taught advanced classes on quantitative methods in poverty analysis, the analysis of social protection systems and impact evaluation. Additionally, Mira worked as a consultant for the World Bank on projects in the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Russia. Since 2015, in cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors, she has been involved in developing and then updating an indicator that measures the extent to which countries have implemented a social protection floor. In a related project, she recently prepared a costing analysis for UN Women's 2019 flagship report Progress of the World's Women.

In 2019, Mira joined the Social Policy Unit of the International Labour Organization's Social Protection Department. Since 2022, she works as Social Policy Specialist at UNICEF in Sri Lanka.

Selected publications by Mira Bierbaum