About

Felipe Barrera-Osorio is Professor of Public Policy, Education, and Economics in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. His primary research objective is to study the effects of educational policies in developing countries, intersecting the fields of development economics and the economics of education. He aims to enhance evidence-informed policy by formulating clear hypotheses about why a policy may work, designing interventions to test these ideas, measuring and evaluating the impacts of the interventions, and scaling them up if successful. He investigates the effects of various school- and system-wide education policies in developing countries, focusing on two main areas of education policy: (i) interventions that aim to change the investment of families and students in education, and (ii) public-private partnership (PPP) policies in low- and middle-income countries.

Dr. Barrera-Osorio is an Affiliated Researcher with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and is affiliated with IZA and the RISE Programme. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness and serves on the editorial boards of American Educational Research Association (AERA) Open and Education Finance & Policy. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was an associate professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, a senior economist at the World Bank, and the deputy director and researcher at Fedesarrollo, an independent think tank in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2008, Dr. Barrera-Osorio received the Juan Luis Londoño Medal, awarded every two years to a Colombian economist under the age of 40. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.