Italo Lopez Garcia is an economist at the RAND Corporation. As a labor and development economist, his research focus is on studying human capital investments over the life cycle.
Lopez Garcia has written about role of public and private investments in children. Using randomized control trials, he investigated the effectiveness of a child psychosocial stimulation intervention in rural Kenya funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) with positive impacts in child development. He also conducted the impact evaluation of a parenting intervention in Chile with impacts in child parental outcomes, and written about the importance of the timing of parental income for intergenerational mobility in Norway.
Lopez Garcia's research interests also focus on the economics of aging. He is the principal investigator of a NIH grant investigating the heterogeneous effects of retirement on cognition by job demands in the U.S. using life-cycle structural models. In another project funded by the NIH and the Social Security Administration, he has examined the role of work capacity on current and future labor supply decisions in the U.S. In previous projects, he studied the role of preferences for long-term care insurance in the U.S., and the incentives for human capital accumulation, labor supply and savings from the defined-benefit pension system in South Korea, and the defined-contributory pension system in Chile.
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.
