I am an Economist (ETC) in the Governance Program of the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation Department, a member of the World Bank’s Bureaucracy Lab, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Brazil’s National School of Public Administration. My research interests lie in development economics, in particular, its intersection with public management and public economics.

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I was born and raised in Balcarce, Argentina. At the age of 18, I moved to La Plata where I received a B.A. in Economics at Universidad Nacional de La Plata. After completing my undergraduate studies, I moved to Buenos Aires to work in the private sector. While working as a pricing analyst, I pursued an M.A. in Economics at Universidad del CEMA. It was then that I realized I am passionate about investigating how the economic approach could be used to analyze social issues beyond the traditional core of economics. This realization changed the path of my career (and my life). I then moved to Houston, where I received an M.A. in Economics at the University of Houston. Soon after, life took me to Rio de Janeiro, where I earned a Ph.D. in Economics from PUC-Rio in 2019.

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Before joining the World Bank, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Innovations for Poverty Action, I worked as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, and I was an Associate Visiting Scholar at the Department of Economics of Harvard University.

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You can contact me at juanfranciscosantini [at] gmail.com or jfsantini [at] worldbank.org

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