Scientific Advisory Board
Tera Allas
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Director of Research and Economics at McKinsey UK and Ireland Office
Tera Allas is Director of Research and Economics in McKinsey’s United Kingdom and Ireland Office, working closely with the McKinsey Global Institute. She leads McKinsey’s research on productivity, technology adoption, and government effectiveness, bringing together deep expertise and more than two decades of experience in economics, public policy, innovation, technology, and leadership, as well as ten years of experience as a management consultant focusing on corporate and business-unit strategy. Tera is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a frequent author, panelist, and speaker on topics ranging from economic and innovation policy to technology adoption and the future of work. She serves as a trustee of the Royal Economic Society, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and the United Kingdom’s Productivity Leadership Group.
Prof. Diane Coyle
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Professor of Public Policy at the Universiy of Cambridge
Diane Coyle is the inaugural Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity, and has been a government adviser on economic policy, including throughout the covid-19 pandemic. Her latest book, ‘Markets, State and People – Economics for Public Policy’ examines how societies reach decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an adviser to the Competition and Markets Authority, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council.
Prof. Olivier Godechot
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Co-Director of Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies, SciencePo, France
Olivier Godechot is a research professor at CNRS. He is interested in the study of labour markets, especially finance and academic labour markets, as a means to understand the development of unequal exchange relations at work and their impact on the dynamics of inequality. Since 2013, Olivier Godechot has been Co-director at MaxPo and directs a research group on the issue of financialization in modern societies, with a special interest in mobility in financial labor markets and their effects on broader inequalities. He has studied the division of labor and ordinary rationalities in a trading room and compensation mechanisms in the financial industry. Extending his interest in labor markets to academia, he has also examined university hiring, in particular the impact of networks on recruitment. He has published four books on finance, labor markets, and traders.
Prof. Eric Hanushek
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Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University
Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues. His widely-cited research spans many policy-related education topics including the economic value of teacher quality, the finance of schools, and the role of education in economic growth. His latest book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth, identifies the close link between the skills of the people and the economic growth of the nation. He has authored or edited 24 books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Prof. Francis Kramarz
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Director of Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST), Paris
Francis Kramarz is Professor at ENSAE, research professor at (ENSAE-ENSAI) and and Visiting Professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. He was an associate professor at École Polytechnique, invited professor at Yale, but also a member of the French Low Wage Commission (Groupe d'Experts sur le SMIC), amongst others. Francis Kramarz is now focusing on his research, trying to understand how social networks (family, former employees...), business networks (groups, customers or suppliers) influence the results of companies, especially their resilience to shocks. He received an ERC grant (1.7 million euros) for this research. As Director of CREST and ENSAE Research Director, he is involved in the newly created Institut Polytechnique de Paris. In particular, he has been a strong advocate for the integration of social sciences into data sciences.
Prof. Sandra McNally
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Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey
Sandra McNally is a Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey. She is Director of the Centre for Vocational Education Research, London School of Economics and is also Director of the Education and Skills Programme, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. Research interests include economic evaluation of government policies in schools and further education; labour market returns to education and training. She is a co-editor of the Economics of Education Review.
Dr. Irmgard Nübler
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Senior Economist at the International Labour Organisation
Irmgard Nübler is a senior economist in the Research Department of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. Her current research program is focusing on technological change, structural transformation and the impact on jobs, skills and the Future of Work, in both developing and developed countries. She manages research projects, undertakes technical work and provides policy advice to ILO constituents. Her main interest in research is currently the role of social capabilities in creating sustained, inclusive and sustainable development for the creation of good jobs and decent work. In previous positions in the ILO, she worked in the areas of skills development, training systems, apprenticeship, industrial development, global value chains and informal economies.
Prof. Jose Antonio Ocampo
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Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Colombia University
Jose Antonio Ocampo is Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) and Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. He is also Chair of the Committee for Development Policy of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). He also teaches regularly at Universidad de los Andes and other Colombian universities. He has occupied numerous positions at the United Nations and his native Colombia, including UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and Minister of Finance, Minister of Agriculture, Director of the National Planning Office of Colombia, and Member of the Board of Directors of Banco de la República (Colombia’s central bank).
Prof. Ben Ross Schneider
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Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT
Ben Ross Schneider is the Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of the MIT Brazil program. Prior to joining the department in 2008, Schneider taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University. Professor Schneider's teaching and research interests fall within the general fields of comparative politics, political economy, and Latin American politics. He also has published on topics such as democratization, technocracy, education politics, the developmental state, business groups, industrial policy, and comparative bureaucracy. Schneider's current research projects include a broader comparative analysis of the politics of education reform in middle income countries with a special theoretical focus on the roles of teacher unions and business. Other projects focus on business politics, innovation policies, and inequality in Latin America.
Prof. Alexandra Spitz-Oener
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Professor of Economics at the Humbold-University in Berlin
Alexandra Spitz-Oener is Professor of Economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, a research associate at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, and at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn. In addition, she is a principal investigator and board member of the Collaborative Research Center/TransRegio “Rationality and Competition“, funded by the German Sciences Foundation. Her research interests are in Applied Microeconomics, in particular Labor Economics, especially understanding the challenges for the German labor market brought about by technological changes, trade and immigration.
Prof. Jens Südekum
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Professor of Economics at University of Duesseldorf, Germany
Jens Suedekum is Professor of International Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics at Heinrich-Heine-University. He is a specialist on global trade, digitalization and labour markets, and published widely in leading academic peer-reviewed journals. According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jens is among the five most influential economists in the German-speaking world. He is a member of the scientific board at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs, and has been an advisor to numerous (inter-)national organizations including the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, Bundesbank, and various political parties and public interest groups.
Bledi Taska
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Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Lightcast
Bledi Taska is Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Lightcast. He is a labor economist specializing in the application of econometrics and data science methods on real time labor market data. At Lightcast Bledi leads a team of economists and data scientists, which supports the company’s public policy research, product development, and collaboration with academic researchers and international organizations. Current projects involve topics around skills mismatch and labor shortages, the future of skills, the effect of automation and COVID, and reskilling of workers based on skill adjacencies. Bledi has been invited to present at conferences organized by UNESCO, CEDEFOP, OECD, World Bank, ILO, IZA, and NESTA among others.
Bledi’s work at Lightcast has been published or featured in several popular media outlets from all over the world, such as the Australian Financial Review, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist, France 24, the Financial Time, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.