Santiago Pinto is a senior economist and policy advisor in the Research Department. He joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in 2012 after serving as an associate professor of economics at West Virginia University, where he had worked since 2002. He previously taught at Syracuse University and several institutions in Argentina. Pinto earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001.
Pinto’s research interests are in the area of applied microeconomics, specifically in the fields of urban and regional economics, public economics, and state and local public finance. His research work has focused on issues related to household mobility, local labor markets, regional assistance to poor households when their income is not observed, and on the equality of opportunity of access to specific goods. Pinto has also worked on a number of issues related to fiscal competition across jurisdictions, including state corporate income tax systems and the implications of using a formula apportionment system, and on urban crime. Simultaneously, he has been developing a line of research on the political determinants of foreign direct investment and on the information content of diffusion indices.