What happens in class.

Teaching is a laboratory. It is where the tools I use in research and consulting are tested against questions from students who come from very different backgrounds — mid-career public officials, public-policy PhD candidates, young Latin American economists preparing for their first fieldwork. Without teaching, you lose the critical reading of your own method.

Courses I have taught

• Empirical Methods for Policy — Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), Harris School of Public Policy (Chicago), LSE School of Public Policy. Syllabus: causal identification, difference-in-differences, synthetic controls, impact measurement in low-data-quality contexts. Materials accessible to the public, without expensive textbooks.
• Development Economics — HKS, LSE. The classics (Solow, Lewis, Hirschman, structural transformation models) put in dialogue with the new generation of experimental evidence and the concrete practice of the Harvard Growth Lab.
• Economic Growth and Development — HKS, Tec de Monterrey EGAP. How growth diagnostics are designed, which binding constraints to identify, how to assess the economic complexity of a subnational region.
• Policy Development Strategy — HKS, EGAP. From diagnosis to implementation. How to organize an engagement with a government, what to ask of the local technical team, how to measure whether the strategy worked.

Current academic affiliation

Since 2021 I have been affiliated with the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics as Visiting Professor in Practice, directing the Growth Co-Lab — a collaboration between the LSE and the Harvard Growth Lab. The cohorts mix master’s students from both institutions.

I also teach at the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tec de Monterrey (EGAP), working with master’s students on development strategy and economic reform in Latin America.

Academic record

• Adjunct Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School (several years through 2021)
• Visiting Lecturer, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
• Professor at IESA, Caracas (prior to the work at the Harvard Growth Lab)

Materials and syllabi

When students ask me for prior course materials, I usually share them. If you are a teacher and would like to adapt one of my syllabi, write to me and I will send it over.

Teaching at the MA and PhD level is the only honest way I know of staying current: every cohort brings questions I didn’t see coming.