Bio

Orazio AttanasioOrazio Attanasio, Professor of Economics

Orazio Attanasio is the Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University and 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.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, where he has served as President in 2020, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014 he served as President of the European Economic Association. 

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. Before joining Yale, he was the Jeremy Bentham Professor of Economics at University College London. Until recently, he was  a Research Fellow and one of the Directors of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a visiting professor of the Center for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) at NHH.

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 Jacobs foundation.

Orazio’s research interests include:

  • Household consumption, saving and labour supply behaviour;
  • Imperfect risk sharing;
  • Evaluation and design of policies in developing countries;
  • The process of human development in the early years and how it is affected by policy 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 Ghana, the evaluation of Lively Minds, a child care intervention currently being scaled up;
  • in Chile, assessing pension reforms and serving on the“Comisión Asesora Presidencial sobre el sistema de Pensiones”.

Curriculum Vitae:
Orazio Attanasio’s CV