Leonardo Gasparini

After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997, Leonardo Gasparini returned to Argentina to join the faculty of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata as a Professor of Economics and the founding Director of its Center for Distributional, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS). Long concerned with poverty and inequality in Latin America, Mr. Gasparini has been a consultant in this area for the United Nations and the UN Development Program and International Labor Organization, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and others. Among his honors are the Premio Fulvio Salvador Paganini (2001), awarded by the Fundación Arcor, and the World Bank’s Regional Spot Award (2003).

Mr. Gasparini’s extensive list of publications includes the following: "On the measurement of unfairness: an application to high school attendance in Argentina," Social Choice and Welfare, 19 (2002), 795-810; "Characterization of inequality changes through microeconometric decompositions. The case of Greater Buenos Aires," in The Microeconomics of Income Distribution Dynamics in East Asia and Latin America, ed. F. Bourguignon, F. Ferreira, and N. Lustig (Oxford UP, 2004); "Equality of opportunity and optimal cash and in-kind policies," Journal of Public Economics, 90, Nos. 1-2 (2006), 143-169; "Capital accumulation, trade liberalization, and rising wage inequality: the case of Argentina," Economic Development and Cultural Change, 55, No. 4 (2007), 793-812; and "Growth and income poverty in Latin American and Caribbean: evidence from household surveys," Review of Income and Wealth, 53, No. 2 (2007), 209-245.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Leonardo Gasparini, in conjunction with Walter Sosa Escudero and Martín Cicowiez, is completeing a textbook tentatively titled Poverty and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Concepts and a toolkit for quantitative analysis.  The book will be accompanied by a web page that features Stata do files and the data sets used in the compilation of the text, which students then can download to assist them in compiling their own analyses of various topics.