Paula Lopez-Peña is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. Her areas of research are applied microeconomics and development economics, with a focus on health, education, and firms and productivity. Recent and ongoing projects have focused on the determinants of skill formation and the mechanisms through which being exposed to poverty, traumatic experiences, and various policy interventions affect economic decision-making, health behaviors and illness, and labor market outcomes.

Paula received a PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick and a Master’s degree in Economics from The London School of Economics. Prior to starting her doctoral studies, she worked as a research fellow—and later as an impact evaluation coordinator—with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC and Nicaragua. Her work was centered on the evaluation of early childhood development programs and the design of survey instruments to improve existing measures of risky health behaviors among adolescents and young adults.