BIO
Orazio Attanasio is the Jeremy Bentham Chair of Economics at University College London, Research Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, and Co-Director of the latter’s Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo@IFS). He is also one of the directors of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy.
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. President of the European Economic Association in 2014, he has also served on the executive committee of the Econometric Society and of LACEA, and as a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society.
After obtaining a PhD at the London School of Economics, Prof. 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.
In 2016 he was awarded the Carlos Diaz Alejandro prize by LACEA and the Klaus Jacobs Research Prize by the Jacob Foundation. In 2017 he was elected 2nd vice-president of the Econometric Society, to serve as president in 2020.
His research interests include: household consumption, saving and labor supply behavior, risk sharing, evaluation and design of policies in developing countries, human capital accumulation in developing countries, early years interventions, micro credit and measurement tools in surveys.
He has carried out evaluations of education financing and access programs, including large conditional cash transfers programs, the impact of scholarships on school enrolment and the effect of subjective expectations on the returns to education.