Italo Lopez Garcia is and 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. As a labor and development economist, his research focus is on studying human capital investments over the life cycle.
In a first line of research, he has studied the role of public and private investments in children. In a recently published paper, he has examined the importance of the timing of parental income on children's outcomes as adults in Norway. Using Randomized Control Trials, he has been the Co-PI of a NIH-funded project testing different models of delivery of an early childhood development (ECD) intervention in rural Kenya, and has conducted the impact evaluation of a large-scale parenting intervention in Chile, where both interventions were found to improve parental child-rearing practicves and boost child cognitive and socioemotional development.
His second line of research focuses on the economics of aging. He is the PI of a NIH-funded project that studies the heterogeneous effects of retirement on cognition in the US, and the Co-PI of a project funded by the US Social Security Administration that examines individual's work capacity over the life cycle and how it predicts labor supply and retirement decisions. In other papers, he has also studied the incentives for human capital accumulation, labor supply and savings from the pension systems in Chile and 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.
