Felipe Barrera-Osorio


Felipe Barrera-Osorio is a Colombian economist and Associate Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Barrera-Osorio's work on the economics of education earned him the Juan Luis Londono Medal, Colombia's equivalent to the John Bates Clark Medal in 2008.

Biography

Felipe Barrera-Osorio earned a B.A. and master's degree in economics from the Universidad de los Andes in 1992, followed by a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003. During his graduate studies, Barrera-Osorio specialized on public economics, labour economics and political economy and published a thesis on the relationship between decentralization and education under Jonas Gelbach, Robert Schwab, Wallace Oates, Jennifer Rice and Seth Sanders. After his graduation, Barrera-Osorio became deputy director of the Higher Education and Development Foundation before accepting a position as Senior Economist in the World Bank's Human Development Network on Education. During his work for the World Bank, Barrera-Osorio led impact evaluations of educational programmes in e.g. Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan, Cambodia and Indonesia. In 2011, he left the World Bank to accept a position as assistant professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was promoted to associate professor in 2015. Besides his academic work, Barrera-Osorio also serves as Head of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association's Impact Evaluation Network.

Research

Felipe Barrera-Osorio's current research focuses on the impact of educational incentives on the learning of children in primary and secondary school. In the past, his research has included the role and impact of public-private partnerships in education, the computerization of education, the design of conditional cash transfer programmes, and the theory and empirics of school-based management.