Andrea Repetto

Andrea Repetto
Andrea Isabel Repetto Lisboa
Born	(1969-05-20) May 20, 1969 Santiago, Chile
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Occupations	Economist professor researcher
Spouse	Pedro Assael ​ (divorced)​
Children	2
Parent	Guillermo Repetto · Carmen Lisboa

Andrea Isabel Repetto Lisboa (born 20 May 1969) is a Chilean economist. She is the director and a professor at the School of Government of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, having previously held a teaching position at Adolfo Ibáñez University. She holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and an undergraduate degree in commercial engineering from the same university.

In December 2018, Repetto was named "Economist of the Year" by her peers, an honor conferred by the newspaper El Mercurio. In 2021, she was named one of the most influential women in Chile's economic field by La Tercera.

Early life and education

Repetto was born in Santiago on 20 May 1969, the youngest of three daughters of pediatrician Guillermo Repetto, an expert in vaccines and public health, and Carmen Lisboa, an academic at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile who specialized in bronchopulmonary disease. Her elder sisters are psychologist Paula Repetto, who holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan and teaches at the Catholic University, and physician Gabriela Repetto, a pediatrician trained at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who specializes in genetics and metabolic disease.

As a child, Repetto lived for a time in Montreal, Canada, while her mother held a research fellowship at the Université de Montréal; she has described attending a local public school there and mixing with classmates of different ethnic backgrounds as a formative experience. Back in Santiago, she was educated at the Colegio Universitario Inglés, a school run by the Esclavas del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (Slaves of the Sacred Heart of Jesus), a Roman Catholic religious order, where she was a standout student.

Repetto enrolled at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in the late 1980s to study ingeniería comercial, choosing the university partly because her mother taught there. As an undergraduate she worked as a teaching assistant in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics, and became involved with CIEPLAN, a Santiago economic think tank, where she met economists including Alejandro Foxley and Andrés Velasco before they entered government. She went on to complete a master's degree in economics at the same university before entering the doctoral program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, becoming the first Chilean woman to earn a PhD in economics from MIT.

Career

Academic and research positions

Repetto is a professor, researcher, and director of the Master in Economics and Public Policy program in the School of Government at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, of which she also serves as director. She previously held a professorship at Adolfo Ibáñez University from 2008, where she was a senior fellow, directed a master's program in economics in its School of Government, and directed its Center for Labor Policy. Her research is based on economics and psychology, with application to household credit and savings and the economics of education.

Repetto has been an academic fellow at the Center for Applied Economics of the industrial engineering department at the University of Chile, where she was also director of the Master of Applied Economics until 2008, elected director of the Society of Economists of Chile, and a visiting fellow at the World Bank. She is also an elected director of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association's (LACEA) executive committee. Fellow economist José De Gregorio has described her as the most internationally cited Chilean economist in her field.

Public service and advisory roles

Repetto has served on numerous Chilean presidential advisory bodies. In 2008, she joined the Presidential Advisory Council on Pension Reform (popularly known as the Marcel Commission, after economist Mario Marcel) and, around the same time, the Presidential Advisory Council on Labor and Social Equity chaired by economist Patricio Meller, where she coordinated the Subcommittee on Labor Market and Labor Policy. She later sat on the advisory panel for the Ethical Family Income program, a conditional cash-transfer scheme for low-income families, and on the Presidential Advisory Commission for the Measurement of Poverty convened during President Sebastián Piñera's first term. In 2015, she was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council against Conflicts of Interest, Influence Trafficking, and Corruption, chaired by economist Eduardo Engel. She chairs the Commission of Users of Unemployment Insurance.

Repetto's first direct involvement in electoral politics came in early 2013, when she joined the economic team advising Michelle Bachelet's presidential campaign, drawing press attention as a newcomer to Chilean party politics. In 2021, she held talks with the presidential campaign of Gabriel Boric, though, consistent with her earlier practice of engaging with public policy debates while declining formal office, she has stated she prefers to remain in academia and civil-society roles rather than take on political appointments.

Think tanks and civil society

Repetto is a co-founder of Espacio Público, a Chilean public-policy think tank established by a group of academics including Eduardo Engel, José De Gregorio, and Andrés Velasco, and continues to serve on its board. At Espacio Público, she led a multi-year research project on youth in Latin America and the Caribbean, Millennials en América Latina y el Caribe, carried out in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank, which was later published as a book. She previously participated in Expansiva, another Santiago policy institute led by Andrés Velasco.

She chairs the board of the Fundación para la Superación de la Pobreza (Foundation for the Overcoming of Poverty), a Chilean anti-poverty organization.

Personal life

Repetto was previously married to Pedro Assael; the marriage ended in divorce. The couple have two children, Pablo and Daniela.

She was later in a relationship with fellow Chilean economist Raphael Bergoeing, with whom she had worked at the University of Chile's Center for Applied Economics in the early 2000s. A November 2013 profile in La Tercera described the two as having been together for more than ten years. By 2020, Bergoeing described himself in a newspaper interview as having been separated from Repetto for several years and in a new relationship.

External links

• Andrea Repetto publications indexed by Google Scholar