Eduardo Engel

Eduardo Engel is the former president and current board member of the think tank Espacio Público and professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chile. From 2001 to 2012 he was Professor of Economics at the Yale University. He chaired the Presidential Advisory Council on Conflicts of Interest, Influence Peddling, and Corruption – also known as the Engel Commission – in 2015.

Education and career

Eduardo Engel graduated from engineering at the University of Chile in 1980. He then received a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University in 1987 and later a second Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991.

After graduating from MIT, Engel accepted the position of assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (1992–1994), before returning to Chile as professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile (1994–2001).

In 2001 Engel joined Yale University faculty as professor of economics, where he spent eleven years (until 2012). He was voted Graduate Teacher of the Year on multiple occasions. He returned to Chile in 2012 to work as a professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Chile.

Engel was elected fellow of the Econometric Society in 2012 and currently serves as council member. From 2014 to 2015 he was president of the Latin America and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and from 2009 to 2011 was founding president of the Chilean Public Policy Society. Engel also headed the Advisory Fiscal Council of the Chilean Government from 2014 to 2016. Engel has worked as a consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and many governments.

In 2012, Engel founded the think tank Espacio Público together with a multidisciplinary group of eighteen prominent experts, including the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize">Pritzker Prize