Senior Economist · World Bank
Sandra V.Rozo
I am a Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. I am also a Faculty Affiliate at UC Berkeley’s CEGA and at USC’s CESR and Schaeffer Center, a Research Fellow at IZA, and an Academic Affiliate at EGAP. I received the 2025 Juan Luis Londoño Award, given every two years to a Colombian under 40 whose research and policy work have substantially improved welfare in Colombia, and contributed to the World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies.
My research asks how policies and institutions can expand opportunity for people facing exclusion, forced displacement, or rapid demographic and technological change. My aim is to generate evidence that improves people’s lives. I combine randomized trials, longitudinal panels, and quasi-experimental methods across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, with recent fieldwork in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Jordan. I co-founded the VenRePs panels of Venezuelan forced migrants in Colombia, for adults and children, and the Syrian Refugee Life Study in Jordan. I pursue this work in three areas.
Research
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Institutions, Inclusion, and Human Mobility
How legal status, access to public services, markets, and shared institutions shape the lives of displaced populations and the communities that receive them.
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Demographic Change
Why fertility, migration, and population patterns are changing so rapidly, and what these transformations mean for individuals, families, and societies.
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Technology and Human Development
Whether digital technologies and AI can expand access to education, socioemotional support, and other scarce human-development services.
Apart from my academic work, I am the author of the book SuperMom: A No-Guilt Guide to Raising Happy Kids and Loving Your Life. También está disponible en español: Supermamá: Una guía para continuar siendo una madre extraordinaria y vivir una vida plena.
World Bank · Washington D.C.
