Laura Garcia-Montoya

Laura Garcia-Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Prior to joining the Munk School, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia). She was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a Postdoctoral Researcher in The Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice and the Politics Department at Princeton University.

She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also completed an M.S. in Statistics. She has also completed M.A. and B.A. degrees in Economics from the University of Los Andes in Colombia.

Dr. Montoya-Garcia’s research interests are in comparative politics and research methodologies. She investigates the political economy of inequality and development in Latin America and its relationship with violence. Her interests in research methods are in the study of causal inference and measurement frameworks.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and Sociological Methods and Research. Currently, she is writing a book entitled, Trapped by Inequality: The Politics of Redistribution in Latin America, in which she identifies the causes of economic inequality traps -— i.e., high and persistent levels of economic inequality — in the region and explains why and how some countries manage to escape such traps and embark on paths of diminishing inequality.

These projects have been possible with funding from the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, The Mamdouha S. Bobst Center at Princeton University, The Buffett Institute, The Kellogg Dispute Resolution Research Center (DRRC), The Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Political Science Department at Northwestern University.