About
Sebastian Olascoaga serves as the Director of Research and Evaluation for the City of Boston and is a Research Affiliate at MIT. He established and now leads the City's evaluation unit, which conducts impact evaluations, representative surveys, and economic analyses that inform budget and policy decisions across major city programs and services. His team also equips city departments with predictive and causal research tools to act on challenges from housing and public health to climate resilience and operations.
Before Boston, he was a research fellow at Redfin running consumer-platform experiments, a visiting health-economist fellow at Optum Labs, Director of Economic Policy at Mexico's Federal Treasury, and a researcher at the OECD in Paris.
Sebastian holds a PhD in Urban Economics and Policy from MIT, an MA in Applied Economics from the Paris School of Economics, and a BA in Economics from CIDE. His research has been covered in The New York Times, Bloomberg, NPR Marketplace, and MIT News, and published in JAMA Network Open, Nature Communications, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), among other journals.
In his free time he's at Fenway rooting for the Red Sox, rock climbing in New England, or searching for fresh waves in the Atlantic.