Jill Luoto is an economist at the RAND Corporation who conducts research in the areas of economic development, microfinance, and behavioral and health economics. She is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Luoto is principal investigator (PI) on a randomized controlled trial testing an innovative sales contract to increase access to and use of durable ceramic safe water filters using mobile banking payment collections in Kenya, as well as a two-year cluster randomized controlled trial of 20 rural health facilities in western Kenya that tests provider- and patient-based interventions to increase utilization of antenatal and postnatal care and clinic deliveries among an estimated 4,000 rural pregnant women.

Luoto has also worked on a joint RAND and USAID project aimed at the development of an evidence framework for evaluating programmatic effectiveness of community-level global public health programs, and a project performing a quasirandomized impact evaluation of cataract surgeries to estimate the economic costs of blindness among poor rural Ethiopians. She has conducted field work studying poor populations on six continents. Luoto received her Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley.