José Morales Arilla

José Morales Arilla returned to Harvard’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2022. He is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Department of Politics. He will join Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2023.

His fields of research are Political Economy and Development Economics. His work leverages advanced quantitative methods to study the political causes and consequences of some of today’s most pressing development issues – inequality, violence, trade and growth.

José first joined the Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2013, and later as a Doctoral Fellow in 2020. Previously, José served as policy advisor to Henrique Capriles’ Presidential Campaign, and as researcher and consultant for the Interamerican Development Bank, IESA, Transparency International, the Revenue Watch Institute, the International Budget Partnership and Venezuela’s Central Bank.

José holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University; a Master’s Degree in Public Administration and International Development (MPAID, 2012), and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela.

He loves playing the drums, watching movies and reading political chronicles.

Christina Langer

Christina Langer joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab in February 2020. She is a PhD student at the Chair of Economics, esp. Macroeconomics at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany. Christina studied economics at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and the University of Southern Denmark and holds a Master’s degree in economics (Master of Science with Honors). Her Master’s course of study is part of the University of Regensburg’s “Honors” program and an elite graduate program belonging to the Elite Network of Bavaria. Her research interests cover the fields of empirical labor and educational economics with a special focus on the labor market effects of technical change and the German apprenticeship system.

Marco Guerzoni

Marco Guerzoni is a professor in Applied Economics at the University of Turin and was formerly a visiting scholar at the Growth Lab in the Center for International Development.

He is co-founder of Despina, the Big Data Lab at the Department of Economics and Statistics, where he teaches Data Science for Business Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Economics of Innovation and Technology policy. His research area covers management and economics of innovation, technology policy, and advanced data science. He has recently been working on the methodological implications of big-data and machine learning for business and social science, with a focus on the issues of model selection, inference, and hypotheses mining. He has been published in international journals, including Research Policy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Italian Journal of Applied Statistics, and Journal of Evolutionary Economics. He is also a member of BRICS-Collegio Carlo Alberto and ICRIOS-Università Bocconi.

Jim Huangnan Shen

Dr. Jim Huangnan Shen is currently a research associate at the Growth Lab at the Center for international Development at Harvard University. He was a visiting post-doc fellow at the Growth Lab, where he conducted research related to product space, export complexity, and structural transformation of developing countries under the supervision of Professor Ricardo Hausmann and Dr. Frank Neffke.

He obtained his PhD in Development Economics from University of London (SOAS). He earned his MSc in Economics and Management and BSc in Management at London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also the co-founder of the Core China Research Center at the University of Navarra in Spain.

His main research interests are in development economics, political economy, industrial economics, public policy, and regional studies. His research has appeared in journals, including Economic Modelling, Journal of Asian Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, and Emerging Markets Finance and Trade. He has more than 15 working papers that are currently at the stage of under review.

He is particularly interested in using the I-O model and World Input-Output database (WIOD) to both theoretically and empirically study the issues of division of gains as well as the industrial upgrading along the global supply chains.

Wensheng Lin

Wensheng Lin was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Development Growth Lab from August to September 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Economic Geography at Peking University (China). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in urban planning from Renmin University (China) and a master’s degree in human geography from Peking University (China).

His fields of interest cover dynamic evolution of China’s export products from the perspective of Social Network Analysis and The rise of China’s innovative enterprises from the perspective of Evolutionary Economic Geography——taking the Mobile phone Industry as an example. 

Current Research/Project:

Therese Danley

Therese was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Development Growth Lab from fall 2019 through spring 2020. Her research focused on empirical analyses of human capital, labor mobility, and career paths, with an emphasis on how labor market opportunities vary across different urban and regional contexts. She was a PhD student at the Department of Geography at Umeå University in Sweden.

Jorge F. Tudela Pye

Jorge Tudela Pye is currently a Young Professional at the World Bank Jobs Group, working on macroeconomics and structural transformation. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked at the IFC’s Macro & Markets Research unit and was part of the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow from 2019 to 2021.  
 
In Peru, he worked as a Senior Equity Research Analyst at Credicorp Capital, a Latin American Investment Bank, at the Ministerial Office of the Minister of Production (Industry) of Peru, focusing on Productive Diversification, and as a Fiscal Economist in the Ministry of Economics and Finance of Peru. He spent a summer with the World Bank’s Macro-Fiscal (MTI) team in Abuja, Nigeria, and developing the Trade Adjustment Program for the Government of Sri Lanka in Colombo with the Growth Lab.

Jorge holds a master’s in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
 
His research interests include Macroeconomics, Public Finances, Trade, Economic Complexity and Growth Diagnostics. 

Rushabh Sanghvi

Rushabh Sanghvi joined the Growth Lab as a Research Assistant in August 2019. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2018, with a Bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Economics and a minor in Entrepreneurial Leadership. As an undergrad, Rushabh was the President of the Tufts Association of South Asians, and helped organize the London India Forum during his study-abroad program at the London School of Economics.

Prior to joining the Growth Lab, Rushabh worked in a strategy consulting role at IQVIA, where he analyzed healthcare data to consult pharmaceutical and biotech clients on market access, policy risk, and patient affordability programs. As a summer intern at Booz Allen Hamilton, he worked on a darknet monitoring project to evaluate the impact of illicit drug sales through cryptomarkets on the opioid crisis. With a strong interest in working at the intersection data, economics, and strategy, Rushabh is passionate about exploring private-public collaborative solutions to development issues. In his free time, he enjoys travelling, hiking, debate, and bingeing on TV shows.

Jessie Lu

Jessie Lu started at the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Assistant in August 2019. Prior to joining the Growth Lab, she worked as a Research Assistant in Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where she worked on a diverse set of projects ranging from capacity building in sub-Saharan Africa to the path to universal healthcare to analyzing multilateral bank replenishments.

She has also served as a Strategy & Knowledge consultant for the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development, focusing on global development finance research. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with a concentration in Medical Anthropology and Global Health from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Lopesciolo

Michael Lopesciolo joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2019.

Prior to joining CID, he worked as a Senior Research Associate at Eaton Vance, a Boston-based asset management firm, covering Latin American economics and politics for the global macro group. He also worked as a Project Associate at Centennial Group International, a boutique policy consulting firm, and spent the past summer analyzing investment options in public-private partnerships and social lending at Argentina’s national pension fund.

Michael holds a B.S. in International Political Economy from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID, 2019) from the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst. His research interests include taxation, fiscal policy, and infrastructure finance.