LEAP - Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies
Michela Carlana is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Visiting Associate Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, where she is also the Director of LEAP. She is affiliated with the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Women in Public Policy Program, and the Center for International Development. Her research focuses on topics related to inequality and education, with particular attention to gender and immigration. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, a Faculty Affiliate of J-PAL, LEAP-Bocconi, and IGIER-Bocconi, and a Research Affiliate of IZA, CESifo, and CEPR.
Team members
A dedicated team of professors specialized in development economics and in anti-poverty programs both in developing and in industrialized countries.
Joint Purpose
LEAP was founded in 2016 and made possible by the generous support of the Romeo and Enrica Invernizzi Foundation. LEAP aims at understanding and fighting poverty through rigorous evaluation methods. Its experts use scientific research and original data collection to establish if a policy program works, to quantify the costs and benefits of a program, to experiment with different implementation options to improve program design and to contribute to capacity building in partner organizations and in recipient countries.
Core Activities
- Establishing potential innovative interventions after a careful research on existing data collection and a review of the literature to assess the state of the art
- Designing original questionnaires to be administered to the targeted individuals or institutions
- Designing interventions and policy experiments that are suitable for quantitative evaluation of their impact and cost‐effectiveness
- Using the most advanced empirical methods of impact evaluation (including randomized evaluations, field lab experiments, non-experimental and structural methods) to measure the effectiveness of public and private interventions
- Producing top quality research outputs related to the above
- Dissemination of the Lab’s findings and initiatives through several channels, including the website, workshops, media releases, reports for our partners and meetings with policy makers