Claudia Martínez A. is Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Chile and Researcher at the Centro de Microdatos of the same university. She is also a member of the International Advisory Panel for the evaluation of new programs in Chile. Her research focuses in intra-household allocation, migration, education and public policy evaluation in developing countries. Previous and ongoing projects include studying the impact of control on remittances and savings of transnational families from El Salvador, and education expectations in Chile.

Claudio Ferraz is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). His areas of interest are Development, Political Economy and Public Economics. In particular, his research focuses on governance and accountability in developing countries and its consequences for politics and public service delivery. His ongoing projects examine how voters react to information campaigns; whether pay-for-performance improve the quality of education; and whether increases in the quality of politicians affect public policies.

Ernesto Schargrodsky received his Ph. D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1998. He is the Dean of the Business School of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has been the Edward Laroque Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the De Fortabat Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His research includes studies of the impact of police deployment on crime, the effect of the privatization of water companies on child mortality, the analysis of popular support for privatizations, the relationship between bureaucratic wages and corruption, the effect of using electronic systems for the payment of welfare programs, and the effects of awarding land titles to squatters. His work has been published at the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Development Economics, inter alia. He has received the Bernardo Houssay Award for Young Researcher in the Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of Argentina and the Premio Consagración from the National Academy of Economic Sciences of Argentina. He has been awarded fellowships, grants and prizes from Harvard University, Stanford University, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, United Nations, Tinker Foundation, International Finance Corporation, Financial Times, PREAL, CONICET of Argentina, and the Global Development Network.

Francisco Gallego holds a PhD in Economics from MIT. He is Assistant Professor in the Economics Institute of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). His areas of interest are Development Economics, Political Economy, and the Economics of Education. He has worked on educational evaluations focused on the impact of information on parents’ decisions. He is the Scientific Director of J-PAL LatAm.

Felipe Kast holds a PhD from Harvard University. He is currently working as
a Professor at the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Chile. His
research focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of poverty, with a
particular focus on the informal sector. He has previously conducted a randomized
evaluation of  Savings Innovations, a remedial training program aimed to
reduce community college dropouts. He is currently working on a randomized
evaluation on the impact of  vouchers for Preuniversitarios a training program aimed to improve a student’s performance in the national University entry test in Chile, but which is only normally taken by wealthier students.

Sebastian Galiani is Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Professor at Universidad de San Andres, Argentina. He is a member of the executive committee of LACEA. In the past, he hold positions at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andres in Argentina and was Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia)and visiting Scholar at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He was the chairman of the Network of Inequality and Poverty of LACEA during 2004 and 2005 and a member of its executive committee between 2004 and 2008.
Sebastian obtained his PhD in Economics from Oxford University and works in the areas of Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics. He published papers in the Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Regional Science and Urban Economics and Labour Economics, among others. His work has been featured in Science, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and various other newspapers around the world. Sebastian has also worked as consultant for United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the governments of Argentina, Mexico, Panama and South Africa.