CSMGEP Profiles: Fernando Lozano

Keeping the Work Close

Fernando Lozano readily admits he wasn’t the best student early in his academic career. As the end of high school neared, he was focused much more on summer travel plans than on figuring out college. His father, however, insisted he wasn’t going anywhere until he got college sorted out.

Lozano pictured himself joining his father in the family tire business, so he showed up to register for admission exams — the first step toward college in his native Mexico — intent on a path toward a business degree. But as he stood in line, he heard people around him talking about how hard it was to get accepted to that area of study because of its popularity, and Lozano did some quick rethinking as he stepped up to the registration desk clerk.

“I asked her, ‘Which one is the easiest one to get into?’ And she said, ‘Economics.’ And the first thing in my mind is, ‘Well, that sounds kind of like business, and I will be able to transfer.’ So I said, ‘Sign me up for that one,’” Lozano recalls with a laugh. “And so that’s how I became interested in economics: complete happenstance.”

Some moments of happenstance are fleeting, but this one stuck. Lozano is now the Morris B. and Gladys S. Pendleton Professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Pomona College in California and a research fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics. 

While Lozano hadn’t planned to study economics, he did lay some groundwork for what would become his career earlier in life.

“I was always interested in reading the newspaper, and this is 1994, so it's the time of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it's the time that in Latin America and in Mexico we're having this discussion between market liberalism and government intervention,” he says. “So I always was very interested in that type of conversation, but I never thought of myself as being part of the conversation.”

Once his formal studies began, that began to change — after a while.

“It was not until I started understanding the intersection between math and economics and social science that I started getting interested in economics and thinking of ways in which we can use these models to explain the world,” he says.

While he was still an undergraduate, Lozano and his family moved to the United States, and he transferred to the University of San Diego. There, he says, his professors encouraged him to continue his study in economics in graduate school. And his new habit of reading The Economist, BusinessWeek, and other magazines with some economics content showed him some incentive, too.

“I remember opening The Economist, and in the front pages of The Economist, they always have these really cool jobs, to work for a UN commission on economic growth or to work for USAID and stuff like that. And those jobs always set requirements: M.A. in economics or Ph.D. preferred. And so that's why I decided to apply to graduate school in economics, because I wanted one of those jobs.”

He wasn’t so sure about the research graduate school would require, but once he got started at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he found mentors to guide him, and his life experience during what he calls “interesting times” gave him lots of ideas for questions he was happy to work hard to explore. One such question was how immigration policy could be used to stabilize the macroeconomy, and a professor nudged him toward a class in labor economics to give him the tools he would need to fully understand that topic and others like it.

“This is the early 2000s, so we were sort of in the middle of the empirical revolution in labor economics, when we were starting to think about how economics can be used to understand the causal relationship between two variables. And I really liked that,” Lozano recalls. “It was really the methodology, the way of thinking constantly about the empirical design to explore social problems, that really spoke to me. So I decided to go into labor economics, not so much because I was interested in understanding labor demand or labor supply, but because the tools that labor economists were using at this time, which were these applied econometrics tools, really resounded for me.”

In his career, Lozano has often used those tools to better understand forces he has seen in his own life. He’s studied how immigrants operate in the economy, including barriers to integration and how legal institutions interact with the incentives for immigrants and people of color to participate in the labor market.
“That's not only my own story, but it's the story of my cousins, of my father and mother, of my friends. And it will be the story of my children,” he says. “So understanding the dynamics that lead our choices under constraints was something that I really wanted to explore. And so it starts with immigration, certainly, but it's also about Latino communities in the United States or about people of color. So I have worked on race, I have worked on ethnicity, I'm really interested in this demographic phenomena.”

He's also really interested in soccer. He recently taught a seminar at Pomona titled “The History, Politics and Economics of the Beautiful Game,” and he’s written or co-written papers that use the sport as a way of looking at larger issues. It turns out that soccer can yield a lot of insights about economics.

“Soccer is really cool because you have a labor market that is global. So you have really international flows of workers with good data on productivity and really good data on compensation,” Lozano explains. “You can ask questions about, for example, how international migration is reflected in players’ productivity, or how individual productivity is reflected in team performance.”

Religion, too, is a research area to which Lozano is drawn from his own experience. “The goal there,” he says, “is trying to understand how religion creates an infrastructure for people to become closer socially, to support each other, to enhance trust.”

Following research questions that are close to the heart wasn’t always easy in grad school, Lozano remembers. But he doesn’t believe in keeping a distance.

I do think that it's important that whichever work I end up doing, it impacts my communities, the people I care about, the people I have grown with. Not only because it's something that I'm interested in, but also I see that there's a potential for improving people's lives.”

He has the “privilege,” he says, of bringing that potential to policy as one of eight members of California’s Council of Economic Advisors, which he has co-chaired since 2020.

His career in economics may have started in “complete happenstance,” but what’s happened since has been very intentional, and another of Lozano’s missions with his work is to help guide the next generation of economists. Grateful for the mentorship he received along the way, Lozano aims to offer similar support to his students at Pomona and to students of colors anywhere. Because happenstance doesn’t really happen by itself. The right question to the right person at the right time can make all the difference. 

Proust Questionnaire

A salon and parlor game of the 19th century made famous by Marcel Proust’s answers, the Proust Questionnaire (adapted here) gets to the heart of things ...

What’s on your nightstand?
A picture of my family and books. I have a rotation of Jorge Luis Borges’ books that I read and re-read; right now in my nightstand I have Ficciones and his complete poems.  

What job would you like to have if you weren’t an economist?
A cinematographer. I just love the ability to represent and reinvent the world on camera.

What is an ideal day? 
I love to play tennis, so my ideal day would start with tennis and actually playing well. After playing tennis I would go for beers with my friends. I will afterwards take my dog for a walk (and she would not pull too much), then I will take a long nap, and in the evening go for dinner and to the movies with my family.  

What trait do you deplore in other people? 
Self-righteousness (and bad tennis calls). 

What trait do you most admire in people? 
Empathy, kinship

What historical figure do you most admire?
This is such a difficult question, but I think it would have to be Francis of Assisi.

What is your favorite extravagance?
Expensive tennis balls, I could buy the more affordable ones at Costco, but I splurge on the expensive ones.

What is your worst habit?
I am too obsessive and hold on to anger and anxiety for too long.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Empathy, kinship

Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman?
I think that dichotomy misrepresents economics as a science. Intellectually, I grew up in the ’90s, so I fell in love with economics through classical price theory, the type of work Armen Alchian and Roland Coase did. If I had the opportunity to hang out with any economist, hands down, Keynes.