Italo Lopez Garcia is an associate economist at the RAND Corporation, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research interests include labor economics and development economics, with a focus on the study of the determinants of human capital investments over the life cycle.
Lopez Garcia has studied the role of public and private investments in children. Using Randomized Control Trials, he conduced the impact evaluation of a large-scale parenting intervention in Chile, and most recently, he tests different models of delivery of an integrated nutrition education and child stimulation intervention in rural Kenya. In other papers, he has written about the importance of the timing of parental income for intergenerational mobility in Norway, and he uses structural models to study marriage, fertility and parental investments decisions in South Korea.
Lopez Garcia's research interests also focus on the economics of aging in the areas of pension reform, retirement and welfare. He has recently studied the role of preferences for quality of nursing homes on long-term care insurance take-ups in the United States. Using a structural dynamic models, he has studied the incentives for human capital accumulation, and labor supply and savings from the defined-benefit pension system in South Korea.
Lopez Garcia holds a Ph.D. in economics from University College London, an M.Sc. in economics from the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and a B.Sc. in industrial engineering from the Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile.
