On December 3rd, the Institute of European Studies (IES) welcomed US Berkeley Professor Sofia Berto Villas-Boa for a presentation to the visiting delegation of faculty and students from the University of Piraeus in Greece. Professor Villas-Boa is a prominent scholar in the Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE) department at Berkeley and delivered an engaging talk on American undergraduate education, economic research methods, and her current empirical work in consumer behaviors. Professor Villas-Boas holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley and has been a faculty member in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department since 2002.
A central portion of her talk addresses the distinction feature of American undergraduate training. Unlike more specialized European models, she emphasized that the US program encouraged students to explore a broader range of subjects before concentrating on a single field. In fact, the professor highlights the importance of developing independent research skills early on, from identity promising research questions to crafting a thesis. She underscored the value of seminars in the US academic environment, where scholars present work in progress and receive student feedback from colleagues who are genuinely invested in the research being discussed. 
The latter half of the presentation showcased her recent research projects, illustrating how economists learn about consumer taste, preferences, and behaviors. While surveys are common for collecting state preferences, she stressed their limitations: average responses are difficult to interpret without detailed knowledge of respondent characteristics. Instead, her world draws extensively on scanner-date, like barcodes from retail purchase records that provision billions of observations over time. Such data, she explained , allows research to infer consumer behavior from revealed choices rather than self-reported on.
One example came from her study on the impact of the 2004 film Sideways on wine consumption. Using a “different-in-differences” design that combines scanner data from retail stores with information on theater location showing the film, Villas-Boas demonstrated that the release of Sideways led to a 20% increase in Pinot Noir sales. Interestingly, the film’s influence did not affect wine prices. At the same time, Merlot purchases declined by approximately 6% suggesting the movie’s narrative shaped consumer preferences in a measurable way.
She concludes with a brief discussion of her experiment work using store-level field date, including research on over the counter productions. These projects, she noted, illustrate how combining experimental variation with large-scale retail data can help identify the casual effects of advertising shocks, omitted variables, and other real-world market dynamics.