Data-Driven Policy Impact Evaluation

Nuno Crato studied economics at Lisbon Technical University and worked as a quantitative consultant for project evaluation and management, Nuno Crato graduated with a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Delaware and worked in the U.S. for many years as a college professor and researcher. Now a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Lisbon, he has published extensively in the fields of time series analysis, econometrics and applied probability models. He served as dean of the Technical University of Lisbon and as President of Taguspark, the largest science and Technology Park in Portugal. An active science writer, he wrote more than a dozen books, some published in the U.K., U.S., Portugal, Brazil, and Italy, receiving a prize from the European Mathematical Society in 2003 and a Science award from the European Union in 2008. From 2011 to 2015 he was the Portuguese Minister of Education and Science. He has continually pledged for data availability and data-based policy evaluation. He works now at the Joint Research Center as a senior grantholder scientist.
Paolo Paruolo is an econometrician with interest in theoretical and applied econometrics and in counterfactual methods. He has a Master in Economics and Statistics from the University of Bologna (1987) and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics (Theoretical Econometrics) from the University of Copenhagen (1995). He was Assistant and Associate Professor of Econometrics at the University of Bologna between 1989 and 1999, and Full Professor of Econometrics at the University of Insubria (Varese) between 1999 and 2013. Since 2013 he is a Researcher at the JRC, in Ispra, Varese, Italy. He is presently the Coordinator of the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME), which includes the Centre for Research on Impact Evaluation (CRIE) at the JRC. For his publication record, he was ranked among the best 150 econometricians worldwide in Baltagi (2007) "Worldwide econometrics rankings: 1989-2005", Econometric Theory 23, p. 952-1012.