Lucio Castro

Lucio Castro is Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and consultant for international organizations based in Washington DC. Previously, he was Alternate Executive Director for Argentina and Haiti at the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB). Prior to that position, he served as Vice-Minister in the Ministry of Production of Argentina. He was also Director of Economic Development at CIPPEC, one of the principal think tanks in Latin America, and Practice Leader at Maxwell Stamp PLC, a leading economic consulting firm, in London, UK. He also worked in Emerging Markets´s finance at Morley Fund Management in London. He was visiting scholar at the Center for International Development (CID) in Harvard University and received the Fullbright Nexus Scholarship. He is  Affiliated Researcher at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).  He holds a Phd in Economics from the University of Sussex in UK and a Masters from the Program in Economic Policy Management at Columbia University.

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. 

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.

Ricardo Hausmann

Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard’s Growth Lab and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. Under his leadership, the Growth Lab has grown into one of the most well regarded and influential hubs for research on economic growth and development around the world.

His scholarly contributions have had a significant impact on the study and practice of development. These include the development of the Growth Diagnostics and Economic Complexity methodologies, as well as several widely used economic concepts, such as Dark Matter, Original Sin, and Self-discovery. His work has been published in some of the top journals in the world, including Science, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of International Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of International Money and Finance, Economic Policy and the Journal of Economic Growth, among many others. These publications have been cited more than 54,000 times.

Since launching the Growth Lab in 2006, Hausmann has served as principal investigator for more than 50 research initiatives in 30 countries, including the US, informing development policy, growth strategies and diversification agendas at the national, regional, and city levels.

Before joining Harvard University, he served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994-2000), where he created the Research Department. He has served as Minister of Planning of Venezuela (1992-1993) and as a member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela. He also served as Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee. He was Professor of Economics at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion (IESA) (1985-1991) in Caracas, where he founded the Center for Public Policy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.

Download CV (last updated August 2023)

Shreyas Gadgin Matha

Shreyas Gadgin Matha is a Senior Computational Social Scientist at Harvard’s Growth Lab. With a background in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and dual degrees in Economics and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Shreyas brings an interdisciplinary perspective to his research.

At the Growth Lab, Shreyas collaborates with Prof. Ricardo Hausmann on economic research utilizing non-traditional data sources such as satellite imagery, textual data, international trade networks, citation networks, and credit card transactions. Some projects of note include analyzing the evolution of occupational tasks in the US over the past 80 years through BERT-based multi-label text classification models and studying production networks in Albania to understand the economic impacts of COVID-19 and shock propagation.

Previously, Shreyas was a Graduate Research Assistant to Prof. Jonathan Gruber at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Shreyas investigated the the impacts of US public R&D investments using NLP and econometric techniques. As a Graduate RA, his work contributed to the book “Jump-Starting America” by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, which explores strategies to revive American economic growth.

Prior to MIT, Shreyas was a Senior Research Associate at J-PAL South Asia, working on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the impact of environmental policies in India. His projects included the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for industrial particulate matter and the public disclosure of industrial emissions in Maharashtra, in collaboration with key governmental agencies.

Shreyas has authored several research papers and policy reports, and has also developed software tools such as py-ecomplexity, a Python package for economic complexity calculations that has been downloaded over 25,000 times, tools for zonal statistics using Google Earth Engine, creating detailed concordances between arbitrary classifications based on textual information, and data visualization platforms tracking country patents and publications, and a platform to visualize aggregations of global satellite imagery over detailed administrative boundaries.

Ricardo Villasmil

Ricardo Villasmil joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2017.

Before joining CID, he worked in private consulting in Venezuela managing projects on a wide range of strategic and organizational issues for over a decade.

His interests in development economics led him to the Andrés Bello Catholic University and to the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), where he has been teaching courses in development and macroeconomics for the past fifteen years.

Ricardo’s involvement in public policy dates back to 1998, when he joined Venezuela’s Congressional Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance two years later. His interests in the practice of development prompted him to take advisory roles for Teodoro Petkoff in the 2006 runoff presidential election, for the democratic coalition between 2006 and 2012 and for presidential candidate Henrique Capriles as Head of his Public Policy Team in 2012.

Ricardo holds a Master in Public Policy from IESA, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University and a PhD in Economics from Texas A&M University.

Miguel Angel Santos

Miguel Angel Santos joined the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2021 as Visiting Professor in Practice and Director of the Growth Co-Lab, a joint LSE-Harvard venture aimed at bringing together the capacities, expertise, and reach of two top academic institutions to expand the activities of the Harvard Growth Lab globally.

Miguel was previously Director of Applied Research at the Harvard Growth Lab, where he led teams in policy engagements aimed at developing top notch research to help governments rethink their growth and development strategies. In his eight years at the Harvard Growth Lab, Miguel was directly involved in projects at the national level in Mexico, Peru, Panama, Venezuela, Jordan, Albania, and Namibia; at the state level in Loreto (Peru) and Chiapas (Mexico); and at the city level in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Hermosillo (Mexico). He also performed as Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and as a Visiting Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, teaching courses in Empirical Methods, Development Economics, Economic Growth and Development, and Policy Development Strategy to graduate students in public policy and public administration over the same period.

Before joining the field of development economics, Miguel held executive roles in corporate finance and business development in Latin America for a decade, performing as Director of Finance for the Cisneros Group of Companies (1997-2003), Head of Corporate Finance for Mercantil Servicios Financieros (2005-2007), and Business Vice-President for Sony Pictures and Entertainment Latin America (2008-2009).

He holds two Master of Science degrees in International Finance and Trade (2011) and Economics (2012) from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University (2014), and a Ph.D. in Economics at Universidad de Barcelona (2016).

Op-eds

• Impact of the 2017 Sactions on Venezuela: Revisiting the Evidence, Brookings Institution, May 2019
• How did Venezuela’s Exchange Control Wound Global Companies?, Vox LACEA, July 2018
• El Paquete de Marudo no logrará ni estabilizar la miseria, The New York Times, September 2018
• ¿Llevará la hiperinflación a la transición democrática en Venezuela? The New York Times, January 2018

Tim Cheston

Timothy Cheston joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2014.

Prior to joining CID, Tim worked for the World Bank in the Social Protection and Labor team for the Latin America and Caribbean region, where he led in the design, negotiation, and supervision of major social protection and labor projects and research in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Bolivia, and Belize. His experience also includes research on the use of psychometric screening tools for small business financing in South Africa with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Africa. He also serves on the Board of Empowerment Health, an NGO providing community-based maternal and child health services in Afghanistan. Previously, Tim led remittance research with the Inter-American Dialogue, worked on microfinance with FINRURAL in Bolivia, and lived in the Dominican Republic, serving undocumented Haitian immigrants through the Dominican Literacy Project.

His research interests focus on: the role of economic diversification in explaining differences in growth between countries as within them; the use of growth diagnostics to formulate more effective economic strategy-making to unlock structural transformation processes; and the formulation of inclusive growth via productive development policies that better integrate the poor into high-productivity activities.

Tim holds a BA in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs from Princeton University and a Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Media

• India-China Trade War: What’s at Stake? The Dollar Business Magazine, TDB Intelligence Unit, October 2017 Issue, p.21
• CID 2025 Global Growth Projections. CID Speaker Series Podcast. July 2017.
• New 2025 Global Growth Projections Predict China’s Further Slowdown and the Continued Rise of India. The Atlas of Economic Complexity. June 28, 2017.
• The Globe of Economic Complexity. Harvard CID. 2016.
• India Likely to Top World’s Growth Chart. The Times of India (New Delhi edition) 26 Dec 2015.
• Manufactura de México impulsará crecimiento de Latinoamérica. Notimex. May 8, 2015.