LEAP - Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies
Scientific Director of the Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies (LEAP). She completed her PhD in Economics at Harvard University (1999). She was President of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) in 2016-2019 and President of the European Economic Association for 2018. She is currently Program Director for Development Economics at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In 2020 she received the Birgit Grodal Award from the European Economic Association. She regularly collaborates with the World Bank and other international organizations to assess the effectiveness of development policies
Executive director Lucia Corno
Lucia Corno is associate professor in the Department of Economics and Finance at Cattolica University and Executive Director of the Laboratory for Effective Antipoverty Policies (LEAP) at Bocconi University. She received her PhD in Economics from Bocconi (2009) and she was graduate visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley (2008). Before joining Cattolica, she held academic positions at University College London and Queen Mary University. She is fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and full member of the EUDN (European Development Research Network. In 2019 Prof. Corno received an ERC Starting Grant to study the reasons behind the persistence of harmful traditions (i.e. female genital cutting). She constantly collaborates with international organizations and governments in developing countries to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of anti-poverty policies.
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