Alexis Diamond is an economist and researcher specializing in causal inference and policy evaluation. He is a coauthor, alongside Alberto Abadie, of the seminal California Tobacco paper, which popularized the synthetic control method as a tool for estimating the effects of policy interventions. He is also a coauthor of the paper that introduced genetic matching, a method for improving causal inference in observational studies.
He is a two-time winner of the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, awarded annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the best work in political methodology presented at an APSA conference.
Alexis holds a PhD from Harvard University and has worked for more than 20 years with the World Bank Group on impact evaluation. In addition, he has worked with the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Previously, he was a researcher at the RAND Corporation in Washington, DC, focusing on bioterror detection following 9/11.
He has been a professor at Minerva University since 2015 and has held faculty positions at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. This Spring Semester, he is serving as Visiting Chair of CEU’s Department of Public Policy.
His work has taken him to more than 50 countries, and he has lived in Budapest, Hanoi, the United States, and Canada.