Orazio Attanasio (Professor of Economics, Head of Department, UCL)

Orazio Attanasio is a Professor of Economics and Head of Department at University College London, and one of the Directors of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy and 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, and is 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.

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 in Latin America includes: in Mexico, serving on the advisory board of “Progresa”, 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 and a training programme for unemployed youth; in Chile, assessing pension reforms and serving on the “Comisión Asesora Presidencial sobre el sistema de Pensiones”.