Monika Lopez-Anuarbe

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Economics professor Monika López-Anuarbe wants students to learn economics by having fun and by relating to this field. She believes any issue has an economic approach and asks her students: Why not learn how to make decisions considering economics? Current research interests include studying the effect of state policies in the long-term care market: how family intergenerational transfers of money and time affect the likelihood and amount of caregiving for elderly parents from their adult children and vice versa.

She is also researching Hispanics' remittance behavior and familism, and long-term care access for Hispanics.

She is in the process of submitting a paper related to this work for the Eastern Economic Journal, and working on a second paper with advanced econometric techniques (Heckman). Lopez Anuarbe has presented this research at conferences in Boston, Middletown, New York, Philadelphia, Storrs and Worcester.

Her specialization fields include health economics, industrial organization, game theory, gerontology and public policy. She studies interdependent and strategic family behavior using game theory and other microeconomic applications.

López-Anuarbe loves to do research with students and is a major and minor adviser to more than 45 students. 

Some students have been hired in a particular job or presented at a conference based on their independent studies. Recent collaborative work includes: “The Declining Status of the Health Care Industry in Greater Boston and New England” (Rebecca Webber, Fall 2008), “Monetary, Accounting, and Fiscal Policy from the Great Depression to the Current Recession” (Caroline Gransee '09, Spring 2009), “The Current Health Care Reform Status of the United States” (Jack Knoll '10, Fall 2009), “The Effect of the Financial Crisis on the Health Care System of Argentina (Christine Lenihan, Fall 2009), and “The Effects of the Euro Currency on the Spanish Economy (Michael Gardner, Spring 2010).

López-Anuarbe is the recipient of the 2017 Helen Mulvey Faculty Award for Fostering Student Achievement.

López-Anuarbe obtained her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Connecticut in May 2010. She has been teaching her own courses since 2003 when she was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. She was also a teaching assistant during her undergraduate years in 1997 at the Universidad de Costa Rica. She has also taught at Wesleyan University and Trinity College.

Visit the economics department website.

Majoring in Economics. 

“I want the students to learn economics by having fun and by relating to this field. Any issue has an economic approach. Why not learn how to make decisions considering economics?” - Mónika López-Anuarbe