Dr. Alfonso Flores-Lagunes is vice president and director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Prior to joining the Institute, Flores-Lagunes was  a professor of economics at the Maxwell School and a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research, both at Syracuse University. He has also been a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and the Global Labor Organization (GLO). Flores-Lagunes also held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Florida, and the University of Arizona. He has been a visiting fellow in both the Industrial Relations Section and the Department of Economics of Princeton University, and visiting scholar and lecturer at Cornell, Ohio State, LISER (Luxembourg), and the Central Bank of Mexico. He serves as editor of the Journal of Population Economics, and associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and the Latin American Economic Review.

Flores-Lagunes’ research focuses on the evaluation of job training programs, of government programs aimed at providing a safety net for the population, the economics of education, and certain aspects of health economics. In his work, he uses and develops methods aimed at the estimation of causal effects and the appropriate analysis of data distributed over space.

He holds a B.A. in economics from Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) in Mexico, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from The Ohio State University.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in August 2008.