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Francesco Franco is an Assistant Professor (Adjunct) in Economics at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, within the Business & Economics faculty, a position he has held since 2004. He earned his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004, a Master's in Economics from Bocconi University in 1998, and a Bachelor's in Economia Politica from Bocconi University in 1996. His research specializations include international macroeconomics, applied macroeconomics, identification in macroeconomics, finance and macroeconomic fluctuations, and machine learning applied to financial decisions. Franco has published key works in prominent journals, such as "Firms and Aggregate Dynamics" with Thomas Philippon in the Review of Economics and Statistics (2007), "The Number of Bank Relationships and Borrowing Costs: The Role of Information Asymmetries" with Diana Bonfim and Qinglei Dai in the Journal of Empirical Finance (2018), and "Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality" with Pedro Brinca, Miguel H. Ferreira, Hans A. Holter, and Laurence Malafry in the International Economic Review (2021). He serves as a referee for leading journals including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Applied Economics, and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
In his career, Francesco Franco has taken on significant leadership roles, including Executive Director of the Economics for Policy Knowledge Center at Nova SBE since 2020, head of macroeconomics at Novafrica in 2011, and Director of the Jefferson Institute of Public Policy since 2016. He has been a member of the Portuguese Statistical Council since 2017 and a board member of the Institute of Public Policy. From 2013 to 2014, he participated as a member of the resident panel on European affairs for Portugal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Franco has contributed extensively to policy analysis through numerous papers on topics such as fiscal consolidation, external rebalancing in the EMU, fiscal devaluation in Portugal, housing policy, migration pacts, public pensions, and the impact of the insurance sector on the Portuguese economy. He also consults at LX Partners.