Paula Lopez-Pena

Paula López-Peña is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University. She completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Warwick and held postdoctoral appointments at the Yale Research Initiative for Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) and Innovations for Poverty Action Bangladesh (IPA-B).

Her primary area of research is development economics, focusing on firms, labor, and health economics. She uses field experiments and panel data to study how adverse life events—from minor daily hassles to traumatic experiences—affect health and labor market outcomes, and to identify scalable interventions that prevent or mitigate these harms. Her current projects explore the causes and consequences of workplace hostility, intimate partner violence, and forced displacement, and how these experiences impact mental health, labor supply, and firm productivity.

She is an Invited Researcher with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Jobs and Opportunity Initiative at MIT and a Research Affiliate with the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) at Yale University.