Yuchen Guo

Yuchen “Mo” Guo is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the academic year 2024/2025 and a PhD candidate in economics at LMU Munich and ifo Institute. His research focuses on structural change, technology and the labor market, using both aggregate and micro data. During his time at the Growth Lab, he will explore the application of network approaches to questions related to inequalities in the labor market and how economies and individuals adapt to changing labor markets in the face of technological change.

Pia Andres

Pia is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and is visiting the Growth Lab until the end of October 2024. Her research focuses on the technological shift towards a low carbon and increasingly digital economy.

She has recently completed her PhD in Environmental Economics at LSE. Before joining the Centre for Economic Performance, she was a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Work at the University of Oxford.

Pia’s previous and ongoing research studies how the global transition to a low carbon economy affects, and is affected by, countries’ interactions in global trade; the relationship between progress in AI and green energy; and the role of policy in shaping the trajectory of AI innovation, among other related topics. During her time at the Growth Lab, she will explore the application of network approaches to technological change, and its relationship with economic development.

Antoine Cornevin

Antoine is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the 2024/2025 academic year and a Ph.D. candidate in International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance, and international trade. At the Growth Lab, Antoine explores how the structure of countries’ import and export bases —such as the concentration of trading partners and the elasticity of traded products—affects how market participants form economic expectations during global geopolitical events.”

David Torun

David is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the 2024/2025 academic year. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of St.Gallen and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, funded by an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship.

His research focuses on international trade and international economics, particularly the stability of trade relations, the propagation of shocks through transportation networks, and the role of history in shaping trade patterns.

During his time at the Growth Lab, he will explore how global trade disruptions – such as protectionist measures and geopolitical conflicts – affect the formation and stability of trade relationships and production networks.

By modeling the role of critical suppliers in global value chains, he aims to provide tools for predicting how countries should respond to trade disruptions.

Gonzalo Arana

Gonzalo joined Harvard’s Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. Before that, he completed the mid-career Master in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining Harvard, Gonzalo was an associate partner at Oliver Wyman, where he led the Public Sector department in Spain and Portugal. Over the past ten years, he has advised companies and institutions in Greece, Italy, Germany, the UK, South Africa, Portugal, and Spain. In 2021, he joined the Spanish Chamber of Commerce to launch strategic projects for the private sector and was part of an expert group that included Spanish Public Administrations to develop strategies to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19.

Since 2016, Gonzalo has been the founder and chair of Proyecto Capicua, a small NGO dedicated to assisting underprivileged children in the suburbs of Madrid, focusing on facilitating their access to education. Gonzalo holds an MBA from INSEAD Business School, an MSc in Economics from the University of Navarra-IESE, and a BA in Management. He is also an Aspen Institute Spain Fellow. His research interests at the Growth Lab include growth diagnostics, green growth, and innovation policy.  He complements this fellowship with his position leading the Public Sector practice at Oliver Wyman in Spain and Portugal.

Publications

Andrea Musso

Andrea Musso  joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024.

He is a 3rd-year PhD student in Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich, mentored by Prof. Dirk Helbing. Previously he obtained a Master’s in Mathematics from the same institution. He is interested in leveraging large datasets to better understand city growth, urbanization, and structural transformation.

Adriana Arreaza

Adriana Arreaza, a Venezuelan national, joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. She is an economist with over twenty years of experience in macroeconomics and development. She joins us from CAF, Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, where she serves as Director of Macroeconomic, leading innovative economic reports, providing sovereign analysis to inform executive-level decision-making, and developing research products to support country strategies. She also served as CAF’s interim Chief Economist, overseeing the bank’s research publications. She has extensive academic experience, lecturing and participating in conferences internationally.

Adriana holds a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University. 

Robert Pell

Bob Pell joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. He is an urban planner with a career in forming, building and leading multidisciplinary firms and teams across five continents. He has worked in the UK in the public sector and then private consulting, mostly in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In 1999 he moved to the USA and for ten years he worked for AECOM, the largest publicly traded AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) firm, where he was the Director of Operations. In 2016, Bob joined Hatch, a Canadian international consulting firm, where he created a unique international team – Urban Solutions – a team of urban economists, planners, designers and policy analysts- in the USA, Canada, UK, South Africa and Australia.

 

In 2023 Bob was a Fellow in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative where he worked on forming a coalition to work with cities and communities in developing countries that are tackling the issues of climate change, urbanization and economic growth opportunities. 

 

Bob has a degree in Politics and Economics from University of Southampton, UK and a Graduate Diploma in Town Planning from Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Alexandre de Queiroz Stein

Alexandre joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. He holds a Master Degree in Economics and he is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Center for Development and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (CEDEPLAR/UFMG), Brazil.

 

His research is in the field of urban and regional development and quantitative methods, focused on the economic complexity approach. His ongoing PhD thesis is about economic complexity at the intra-urban level, specifically on spatial distribution patterns underlying productive diversification in large Brazilian cities. He is also a member of the Research Groups on Public Policy and Development (GPPD/UFMG) and the Research Group on Regional Economic Resilience (RESILIRE). He has experience in research and consulting projects on topics such as regional development and productive diversification. Currently, he also serves as the manager of the data analytics team at DataViva—a data visualization platform with a specific focus on the economic complexity approach for Brazil.

Diego Martin

Diego joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development as a part-time researcher in 2023. Before joining the Growth Lab, Diego graduated with a Ph.D. in Economics at Purdue University. In his thesis, he studied the impact of providing information to women to increase female labor participation.

He received his BA and MA degrees in Economics from Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. Diego has worked as a consultant at the World Bank, the IOM -International Organization of Migration, and Princeton University. He has also worked for three years at CAF-Latin American Bank in Colombia and Argentina. His research interests include development economics, migration, labor markets, and impact evaluation of policies.