Samuel Freije-Rodriguez joined the World Bank in 2008 and is currently Lead Economist in the Poverty Global Practice.

His main areas of work include labor economics, distributional analysis, and welfare impacts of public policy. He has participated in World Bank studies on labor markets, poverty, equality of opportunities and distributive impact of tax policy for several Latin American countries. He has published book chapters and articles in refereed journals on income mobility, program evaluation and labor market issues.

Prior to joining the Bank, Samuel was an Associate Professor at Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico and Associate Professor at IESA in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2007 he was part of a multidisciplinary team under the coordination of the Mexican Institute for Public Health preparing the evaluation of the “Oportunidades” social development program. Between 2004 and 2006, he was a member of the Scientific Referee Committe of the Fondo Sectorial de Investigación para el Desarrollo Social of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) in Mexico.

Samuel is also associate editor of Economia, the Journal of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, LACEA. Samuel has a PhD in Labor Economics from Cornell University.

He is a member of the team that produced the current World Development Report 2013 on Jobs.