paula.lopez-pena

Paula López-Peña

I am an Assistant Professor of Business Economics at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University. My primary area of research is development economics, focusing on firms/labor and health economics.

I use field experiments and panel data to study how adverse life events—from minor daily hassles to traumatic shocks—affect health and labor market outcomes, and to identify scalable interventions that prevent or mitigate these harms.

My current projects explore the causes and consequences of toxic managerial practices, intimate partner violence, and forced displacement, and how these experiences impact mental health, labor supply, and firm productivity.

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

✉️ paula.lopezpena@queensu.ca

📄 CV

The Cox's Bazar Panel Survey

I am a Principal Investigator of the Cox’s Bazar Panel Survey (CBPS), a longitudinal study tracking living standards among Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and the host population in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

The project aims to: i) build an evidence base on the impact of forced displacement on the economic and social lives of refugees and hosts, and ii) evaluate the impact of interventions aimed at integrating the displaced population into economic and social life and at maintaining or improving the well-being of hosts.

The CBPS is the result of a partnership between the Yale Research Initiative for Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), the Gender & Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) initiative, and the World Bank. The panel dataset is publicly available in Dataverse: [Round 1, 2019] [Round 2, 2022/23]