Florencia Lopez Boo

Dr. Florencia Lopez Boo holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford (UK), where she was granted an Oxford University Press Award/Clarendon Scholarship, a master’s in Development Economics from the University of Namur (Belgium), and a bachelor’s in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Her work uses randomized controlled trials and interdisciplinary approaches to identify innovative and scalable ways to improving the lives of children and their families’, combining the perspectives and methods of development economics with behavioral sciences, neuroscience, and developmental psychology.  In particular, her research focuses on rigorously evaluating human development programs implemented at a national scale in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), with an emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). She has advised and conducted research with the governments of Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay.  In 2020 she was an expert/advisor in the IDB-Gov Lab NYU Smarter Crowdsourcing Covid Initiative to advise governments on their communication strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2019-2021 she also co-founded and advised the first two Nudge Units in LAC.

She published more than 60 articles across a variety of disciplines and journals like The Lancet, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, Child Development, JAMA and Pediatrics. The rigorous policy evaluations she has conducted have had a substantial policy impact, prompting governments to make paradigm-shifting policy reforms, program scale-ups, scale-downs, or redesigns to address some of the most pressing social problems.  Her research has been featured in The Economist, El Pais, and the Washington Post, among others.

Prior to joining NYU, she was a Lead Economist at the Social Protection and Health Unit of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she led the Early Childhood Development (ECD) team, the IDB ECD Innovation Fund,  and an initiative on behavioral economics and social policies. She advised LAC governments on the design, implementation, and evaluation of human development public policies, particularly on child development, social protection and health. In her work in LAC, she led operations for a total of $900M and has garnered more than $40M to conduct research that bridges the fields of child development, education, health, social protection, behavioral economics and policy.

She is also a member of various global boards and an active promoter of diversity: she was a founding member of networks of women economists globally and in LAC.