Dr. BenYishay is a development economist specializing in empirical microeconomics, geospatial impact evaluations, and randomized control trials. He heads AidData’s Research and Evaluation Unit, and oversees the AidData Research Consortium, some 120 academics at 50 universities worldwide. His current research focuses on the impacts of foreign aid programs on agriculture and deforestation as well as human health and social capital. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Nature Sustainability, Journal of Development Economics, and many other outlets.

David Laborde is the Director for Agrifood Economics division at FAO since February 2022. In this role, he supervises a number of flagship publications, like the State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) or the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA). He also overviews the work of the division on policy monitoring, policy reform and realignment of incentives to support agrifood system transformation, in particular in the context of climate change.  In his role, he also provides leadership to two priority program priority areas focusing on resilience and, on the bioeconomy. Based on his extensive experience in the field, he also contributes to strengthen the economic modelling capacity of the institution. Before joining FAO, he was working at the International Food Policy Research Institute of the CGIAR, based in Washington D.C. during 16 years, as part of the Markets, Trade and Institution Division, leading the research theme on Macroeconomics and Trade. He was also co- director of the Ceres2030 project. During his career, he has published extensively (more than 150 publications) and received a number of prizes for his work.

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