Lara Ezquerra
I’m Lara and I teach in the Master in Applied Economics. I’m Spanish, but my educational journey has taken me to the Basque Country at the edge of Spain and to Middlesex University in London, where I earned my PhD. To me, reading, traveling to new places and meeting people with different backgrounds are inspiring opportunities to learn.
“By understanding overall behavior, we may also be able to better understand our own.”
Changing the world through empowered decision-making
Economics first emerged as a passion for Lara Ezquerra during her undergraduate program in Business Administration and Management at the University of the Basque Country. From there, she decided to turn her passion into her career, enrolling in a Master in Economics: Empirical Applications and Policies at the same institution.
For Lara, economics serves as a window into human behavior and decision-making. She is fascinated by how economics tools and theories can be leveraged to understand why people do what they do and make certain decisions. Driven by a desire to learn more, Lara enrolled in a PhD in Economics at Middlesex University London.
When she wasn’t conducting her own research projects during her four years as a PhD candidate, Lara was busy acting as an assistant in a range of economics courses, from microeconomics to econometrics. By the time she concluded her PhD, Lara had also earned her Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education.
Specialized in behavioral and experimental economics, Lara recommends that interested readers take a look at films like the American documentary Freakonomics (2010) and books such as Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler; Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler; and Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely for deeper insight into these fields. Lara feels that a deeper understanding of people’s behavior is fundamental to creating systems that encourage people to do the right thing and make better choices.
At IE University, Lara is part of the team of instructors for the Master in Applied Economics.
She is proud of her work training the next generation of behavioral economists, whose analytical skills and knowledge will be central to driving all sectors forward and avoiding major economic failures.
In her role as a professor, Lara believes that her purpose is to give students a glimpse of how they can design interventions that will have an effect on people’s lives, offering improvements and deeper understanding both at the individual and societal levels. Ultimately, she hopes that the combined power of the small efforts of each person and single changes can yield desirable behaviors that will benefit everyone, economically and otherwise. She hopes that students walk out of her classroom with a better understanding of not only overall behavior, but also their own.
“By understanding overall behavior, we may also be able to better understand our own.”
