Florencia Lopez Boo received a Ph.D (Dphil) in Economics from the University of Oxford in 2008. She held the Clarendon-Oxford University Press award from 2003-2007. She also holds an MSc in Development Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain and Namur University (Belgium).

Florencia is currently a senior economist with the Social Protection and Health Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Her work focuses on early childhood development and evaluation of the impact of social protection programs. Most of her current work includes projects and evaluations to inform scalable approaches to parenting interventions. Other research includes work on the measurement of quality in child care settings for very young children at scale.

Her work has been published in peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, Pediatrics, Economic Letters, the New York Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Development Studies. She is also the author and co-author of books on education and early childhood development in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is also a member of global Steering Committees on child development, including The 2016 Lancet series on Child Development and the Investing in Young Children Forum of the National Academy of Sciences.

Florencia's research interests include early childhood development (cognitive skills, health and parental investment, impact of ECD programs), labor economics (children’s and youth work-education decisions, wage inequality) and development economics (inequality and poverty).

She joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in April 2009, and became an IZA Research Fellow in January 2013.