Editors
Harun Onder, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Howard G. Buffett Endowed Chair on Conflict and Development in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University, where he also leads the Program on Conflict and Development. His research focuses on key development policy challenges, including the economic consequences of demographic changes, natural resource shocks, and conflicts, including forced displacement.
Before joining Texas A&M University, Dr. Onder served as the Deputy Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region at the World Bank, where he spent more than 15 years conducting research and policy dialogue across the MENA, Europe and Central Asia, and East Africa regions. During his tenure, he led three World Bank budget-support operations in Tanzania and Angola, facilitating critical reforms such as the adoption of digital innovations for agricultural resilience, universal health insurance, and private sector participation in electricity transmission, and the removal of fossil fuel subsidies.
Dr. Onder has led large analytical programs on conflict-driven policy challenges, including the World Bank’s Analytical Roadmap for the conflict in Syria. This program informed international efforts to mitigate the economic fallout of the war in the Mashreq Region. Additionally, he led the Bank’s technical assistance to the Government of Ukraine in designing a post-conflict recovery strategy for Eastern Ukraine.
Tito Cordella is a Senior Lecturer at SAIS DC. He began his career in academia, teaching at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and the University of Bologna. He then had a long stint at Bretton Woods Institutions, where, alternating operational and research activities, he gained extensive policy experience on a wide range of issues (monetary and fiscal policies, financial crises, banking, finance, growth, sovereign debt and debt restructuring, financial products, among others).
At the International Monetary Fund, he served in the Monetary and Exchange Affairs Department and later in the Research Department, where he focused on international financial architecture reforms. At the World Bank, he was Lead Economist for Brazil, Deputy Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean region, and Adviser to the World Bank Chief Economist.
Tito is an honorary member of LACEA, serves on the Scientific Committee of LTI@UniTO, and is an Advisory Editor of the Latin American Journal of Central Banking and has published widely in banking, international finance/development, and trade.
An Italian national, he holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain (European Doctoral Program).
Anna Maria Mayda is Professor of Economics at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the School of Foreign Service and Economics Department. She studied statistics and economics at University of Rome La Sapienza, and received a PhD in Economics at Harvard University. She was a visiting scholar in several institutions including the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC, CEPII in Paris, EIEF in Rome, etc. More recently she was Senior Economist and Senior Adviser in the Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. State Department. She is a Research Affiliate at CEPR and CReAM. She is a member of: the Migration Unit Advisory Board at the Inter-American Development Bank, the Scientific Committee of CEPII; the Academic Advisory Committee of the World Bank’s “World Development Report 2023 on Immigration.” Her research mainly focuses on issues of immigration, trade and political economy and has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied, the Journal of International Economics, etc.
