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.