| Felipe Barrera-Osorio | |
| Nationality: | Colombian |
| Institution: | Vanderbilt University |
| Field: | Economics |
| Awards: | Juan Luis Londono Medal |
Felipe Barrera-Osorio is a Colombian economist and associate professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.[1] 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.[2]
Felipe Barrera-Osorio earned a B.A. and master's degree in economics from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) 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 (Fedesarrollo) (2004–06) before accepting a position as Senior Economist in the World Bank's Human Development Network on Education (2006–11). 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.[3]
Felipe Barrera-Osorio's current research focuses on the impact of educational incentives on the learning of children in primary and secondary school.[4] In the past, his research has included the role and impact of public-private partnerships in education (with Harry Anthony Patrinos and Juliana Guáqueta),[5] the computerization of education (with Leigh Linden),[6] the design of conditional cash transfer programmes (with Marianne Bertrand, Linden and Francisco Perez-Calle),[7] and the theory and empirics of school-based management (with Patrinos, Tazeen Fasih, and Lucrecia Santibánez).[8]