Excellence in Research - Ramon Lopez

Dr. Ramon Lopez joined the faculty of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department in 1983 and has had a remarkable impact on research in economic development and on resource issues related to development.

Dr. Lopez's research is characterized by imagination and innovation. His high level of creativity has led peers to regard his work as seminal in several areas. His studies, which emphasized the various sources of interdependencies between production and consumption decisions of the farm household, derived important new policy implications that do not apply in traditional non-recursive models, provided a methodology to estimate and test for such interdependencies, and derived empirical estimates of these effects.

Other early lines of Dr. Lopez's research involved the estimation of supply and input demand responses of agriculture. His important methodological contributions on the use of flexible functional forms in empirical analyses as well as on the interpretation of the dual estimates were developed in a series of studies. In each case, his works stimulated a large body of literature on the use of duality theory in empirical studies.

In the late 1980s Dr. Lopez and his associates began a research agenda that emphasized renewable resources as an important factor of production. They proposed a general-equilibrium approach to environmental economics. Again, the large literature that has emerged on trade and the environment is a testament to the pioneering nature of his original work.

More recently, Dr. Lopez has developed a research interest in economic growth and the empirics of rural poverty in lesser-developed countries. His work has focused on the conditions under which it is possible to sustain economic growth while preserving the environment.

Dr. Lopez is also an internationally recognized researcher outside of the agricultural field. Important advances have been made in the area of trade reform, in part due to Dr. Lopez's research on trade reform in a world with multiple distortions. Much of his work has had a profound impact on trade policy debate and on the profession as well.

Dr. Lopez was recently awarded the Humboldt Research Award for lifetime research excellence. This premier award in science has been presented to natural and social scientists and engineers. Dr. Lopez will be given the opportunity to carry out research projects of his own choice with colleagues in Germany. "Excellence" clearly defines Dr. Ramon Lopez's research program.

For more information, contact Gail Yeiser

Last updated: 03/12/2009