Orazio Attanasio

Orazio Attanasio is the Jeremy Bentham Research Professor of Economics at University College London, Research Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, one of the Directors of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy and co-director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo@IFS) at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research. In 2001 he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and in 2004 Fellow of the British Academy. In 2014 he was President of the European Economic Association. He was in the executive committee of the Econometric Society and of LACEA and a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society.

After obtaining a PhD at the London School of Economics, Orazio taught at Stanford University and the University of Bologna. He was also a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He has been Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association and Quantitative Economics.

In 2016 he was awarded the Carlos Diaz Alejandro prize by LACEA and the Klaus Jacobs Research Prixe by the Jacob foundation. In 2017 he was elected 2nd vice-president of the Econometric Society, to serve as president in 2020.

Orazio’s research interests include: household consumption, saving and labour supply behavior; risk sharing; evaluation and design of policies in developing countries; human capital accumulation in developing countries; early years interventions; micro credit; measurement tools in surveys.

He has carried out evaluations of education financing and access programmes, including large conditional cash transfers programs, the impact of scholarships on school enrolment and the effect of subjective expectations on the returns to education.

Orazio’s policy-focused work includes:

• in Mexico, serving on the advisory board of “Progresa- Oportunidades”, assessing the impact of a high school scholarship programme for the Ministry of Education, and evaluating “Jovenes con Oportunidades”;
• in Colombia, directing the evaluations of the conditional cash transfer programme, a training programme for unemployed youth, a workfare programme and several child stimulations programmes;
• in India, the evaluation of a large early childhood development intervention;
• in Chile, assessing pension reforms and serving on the“Comisión Asesora Presidencial sobre el sistema de Pensiones”.