Associate Professor Public Budgeting and Finance
School of Public and International Affairs - University of Georgia
Email: flozano@uga.edu
My research interests lie in the intersection between public finance and social policy. I focus on taxation and behavior and on revenue-generating social-policies that provide different levels of governments with fiscal independence while at the same time tackling social problems, and substance and health issues, in particular. My specific interests include consumption taxation effects on local government finances, excise taxation to influence behavior, the U.S. opioid epidemic, consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more recently, changes to the SNAP program.
As examples, my Health Economics article shows Philadelphia's soda tax reduced sugar purchases well beyond the beverages it taxed — evidence that excise taxes shape consumption more broadly than their statutory base suggests. On the local-finance side, my Public Budgeting & Finance article uses the DEA's 2014 hydrocodone rescheduling to trace how county governments responded: health and welfare spending rose in exposed communities while policing and corrections spending held flat, funded largely by intergovernmental transfers that began climbing as the epidemic unfolded.
This agenda keeps growing on both fronts. On the health side, a paper conditionally accepted at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, with Prof. David Bradford, traces a 2007 surge of diverted opioids to Colombian traffickers and finds it lowered opioid mortality by the inability of trafficking organizations to entirely substitute their shrinking illegal supply with legally manufactured opioids. A forthcoming American Journal of Health Economics piece, with Prof. Amanda Abraham, Prof. Sumedha Gupta and Prof. David Bradford, shows medical cannabis laws cut opioid prescribing among the commercially insured by nearly 16%. On the finance side, a 2026 International Review of Economics and Finance article, with Prof. Luis Navarro (University of Washington), shows the Fed's Municipal Liquidity Facility reduced municipal-bond volatility during the pandemic. I'm also extending my consumption-tax agenda to food assistance, studying with Prof. David Frisvold how SNAP purchase-restriction waivers affect beverage purchases.
My research has also appeared in Health Affairs, PNAS, Demography, the Municipal Finance Journal, JAMA Health Forum and JAMA Network Open, and has been covered by US News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal, Tax Foundation, and NPR. More on my research here.
I joined UGA's School of Public and International Affairs as an Assistant Professor of Public Budgeting and Finance in Fall 2020, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2026. I received my PhD in Public Affairs from Indiana University's O'Neill School in 2020. Previously, I consulted for the World Bank on student financial aid and served as Chief Planning Officer (2014) of ICETEX, Colombia's student loan agency.
As a (somewhat still) recently minted scholar, I want to recognize here the enormous influence that Professors Maureen Pirog, Justin Ross, and Kosali Simon exerted on me as part of my Dissertation Committee.
