Ana Costa is a professor at ISCTE, Lisbon University Institute (Political Economy Department of the School of Social Sciences) and researcher at DINAMIACET (Research Centre for Socioeconomic Change and the Territory). She graduated in Economics and concluded a Master in Development and International Cooperation at ISEG (Lisbon University) and a PhD in Economics at ISCTE. Her PhD thesis is entitled "The Difficulty of Choice. Action and Institutional Change". She was subdirector of DINÂMIACET. Member of the Observatory about Crisis and Alternatives (Centre for Social Studies - University of Coimbra), in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Her current research interests include the political economy of austerity with an emphasis on the theoretical and epistemological foundations of the 2007-2008 economic crisis and responses to the crisis, values conflicts, value incommensurability and valuation in public decision-making. Description of the current research programe: The relationship between ideas, discourses and policies and how this coalition comprises various spaces for the production and circulation of economic knowledge is the issue that frames this research programme. The manner through which it is developed is by considering that this relationship does not exist in a vacuum, but in interaction with a set of economic, social and political forces and with economic processes and results.: (a) analysis of the narratives mobilized by economists and other actors as, for instance, journalists about the functioning of the economy, that constitute the underlying epistemic and value-laden presuppositions to public policies; (b) analysis of the dominance of certain economic ideas and the underlying mechanisms justifying such dominance. The case of the Bank of Portugal situated at the interplay between the production of economic knowledge and economic policy advice; (c) study of the impact of the internal devaluation measures and of liberalization and financialization trajectories in terms of their setorial variegated impact and of the wage relation. From a theoretical point of view, the research is based on the fields of political economy and institutionalist economics. The preferred methodological approaches are: a) case study; b) comparative analysis; c) content analysis and d) statistical analysis.