Orazio Attanasio named the Cowles Professor of Economics
Orazio Attanasio, recently appointed as the Cowles Professor of Economics, focuses his research on 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.
Having previously researched a life cycle model of consumption, saving, and labor supply, Attanasio has focused his recent work on the effect of different programs in developing countries. He has carried out evaluations of education financing and access programs, including large conditional cash transfers programs, microcredit, the impact of scholarships on school enrollment, 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. He has conducted policy-related work on these issues in India, Colombia, and Ghana. He has also advised the governments of Chile (on pension reform) and Mexico (on the design of Conditional Cash Transfers).
A native of Italy, Attanasio earned his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. He then taught at Stanford University and the University of Bologna. He was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2019, Attanasio served as the Jeremy Bentham Research Professor of Economics at University College London and research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. Currently, he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society.
Attanasio has served as managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and Quantitative Economics. In 2014, he was president of the European Economic Association. In 2016, he was awarded the Carlos Diaz Alejandro Prize by the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association and the Klaus Jacobs Research Prixe by the Jacob Foundation. In 2017, he was elected second vice president of the Econometric Society, and will serve as president in 2020.
