Dr. Kristian López

Kristian López Vargas is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Director of the LEEPS Laboratory. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences with a concentration in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP); he earned a master’s degree in Economics from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland.

His research lies at the intersection of experimental economics, behavioral economics, and market design. He has published in journals such as the American Economic Journal, Experimental Economics, World Development, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Information Systems Research, and Games and Economic Behavior, among others. His current work includes the study of market design and the impact of AI on various areas of the economy.
He also studies the effects of behavioral interventions on pro-environmental behavior.

He has given seminars at universities such as Stanford, the Toulouse School of Economics, Pompeu Fabra, and the Australian National University, among others. He has served as a reviewer for Management Science, Experimental Economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and the International Economic Review, among others.

At UCSC, Professor López Vargas has supervised doctoral dissertations on experimental economics and market design and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN). He is a co-founder of the Workshop of Experimental and Behavioral Economics of the Americas, a permanent virtual seminar on experimental and behavioral economics, co-organized by researchers from North and South America. Finally, he is a co-founder and director of BEX Consulting, a consulting firm specializing in experimental and behavioral economics.

Dr. Juan Francisco Castro

Senior Professor in the Department of Economics, Dean of the School of Economics and Finance, and member of the Research Center at the Universidad del Pacífico. He holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Oxford (UK), an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Universidad del Pacífico.

His research focuses on child development, skills formation, education, and applied microeconometrics. He has authored numerous publications on these topics and has served as a consultant for institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the UK Department for International Development, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion, and the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Peru.