INVITED SPEAKERS – By session
Friday, November 17
4. The impact of robots in Latin America
a. Irene Brambilla
Professor Brambilla is a Professor of Economics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Buenos Aires. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Universidad de San Andrés, a Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Previously, she held the position of Assistant Professor at Yale University. She obtained her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004. Professor Brambilla's research interests are international trade and applied microeconomics, with a focus on the exporting behavior of firms, investment in technology, and labor demand. She has taught courses on international trade, empirical methods in industrial organization, applied econometrics, and intermediate microeconomics.
b. Maurice Kugler
Professor Kugler is a professor of public policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His research expertise is on the role of new technologies in boosting economic growth and labor productivity (aka endogenous growth theory). His work encompasses analyses of productivity growth, global labor markets, foreign direct investment, global value chains, human capital formation, international trade, and international migration. Professor Kugler was head of research for the Human Development Report, the UN’s annual flagship publication on international economic development, after he was a senior economist at the World Bank. His research has been widely published in top academic journals in economics, including the American Economic Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and Economics Letters, among others. Professor Kugler earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Paul M. Romer, after getting BSc and MSc degrees in economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
5. Public spending rules and accountability
a. Horacio Larreguy
Professor Larreguy is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. He is a Visiting Researcher at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST). Before that, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, a master’s in economics and finance from CEMFI, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires. His research interests include political economy and development economics, using both theory and empirics. Broadly, he has been interested in political accountability and voting behavior in Africa and Latin America. In particular, he has worked on clientelism and vote buying, the importance of information for political accountability, whether education fosters political participation, and, whenever possible, the relevance of social networks for these and other development issues. More recently, motivated by the COVID-19 infodemic, Professor Larreguy has been working on various projects on misinformation in Bolivia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
b. Diana Moreira
Professor Moreira is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. She holds multiple affiliations, such as Faculty Affiliate at the NBER Political Economy Program and Development Economics Program, as well as at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). Additionally, she is an invited Researcher for JPAL and the Weiss Family Fund and a Lemann Fellow. Her research focus is on the field of Development Economics and its intersection with Public, Political, and Organizational Economics. As a researcher, she’s interested in two topics: poor governance in governments and social mobility, both of which she studies in the context of developing economies. Her research has been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Public Economics and has been featured in leading Brazilian media outlets. Professor Moreira earned a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University. In the past, she worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC, supporting countries in the Latin America and Caribbean Region and countries in the South Asia Region.
6. Advances in monetary policy
a. Saki Bigio
Professor Bigio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at UCLA. His work is focused on the theoretical and quantitative nexus between financial-market liquidity, credit, payment systems, and macroeconomy. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from New York University and a B.A. in Economics from the Universidad del Pacífico, Perú. Prior to UCLA, he was an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School. Professor Bigio has held Visiting Scholar positions at Princeton University and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. His main areas of research interest are macroeconomics, finance, and banking.
b. Louphou Coulibaly
Professor Coulibaly is a junior scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where he was previously a visiting scholar. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; before assuming this role, he was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Coulibaly received an M.Sc. from the École Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d'Économie Appliquée and a Ph.D. from the University of Montreal. His research centers on international finance and macroeconomics; of particular interest to him is the design of monetary and macroprudential policy. Professor Coulibaly’s work has been published in the International Economic Review, and in 2021, he was the recipient of a grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.