Italo Lopez Garcia is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at USC. He is a labor and development economist, with a focus on the study of human capital development at different stages over the life cycle.

He has been the Co-Principal Investigator of an RCT in Chile and two NICHD-funded cluster RCT evaluations in rural Kenya testing the short- and longer-term impacts of group-based parenting interventions to improve early childhood development (ECD) and parenting outcomes among disadvantaged families and children growing in poverty. His most recent focus is to test for intervention modalities that are scalable and able to sustain impacts in the longer-term in resource-poor and rural settings.

His work also involves studying how older workers in the United States make health investments and labor supply decisions, and how these choices impact their long-term cognitive health and well-being. In ongoing work, he examines how the individual’s abilities and occupational job demands determine the health capacity to work at older ages and the implications for policy, as well as how cognitive, physical and social work and non-work activities are jointly determined and together influence future health and cognition.

In his research, he employs a variety of research designs including randomized control trials, quasi-experimental methods, and structural dynamic behavioral models. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University College of London and prior to joining CESR, he was an Economist at RAND.

Italo joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in July 2016 and became an IZA Fellow in November 2021.