Orazio Attanasio to Join Department

In a recent announcement, Orazio Attanasio has been appointed Professor of Economics and will join the department next academic year. Professor Attanasio is currently 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.

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.

Professor Attanasio’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.

Working previously on life cycle model of consumption, saving, and labor supply, Professor Attanasio’s recent work focuses extensively on the effect of different programmes in developing countries. He has carried out evaluations of education financing and access programmes, including large conditional cash transfers programmes, microcredit the impact of scholarships on school enrolment and the role of subjective expectations on individual choices, microcredit and more. His most recent research focus is on scalable early years interventions in developing countries. 

After obtaining a PhD at the London School of Economics, Professor Attanasio 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.