Giovanni Cerulli is research director at IRCrES-CNR, Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth, National Research Council of Italy, Unit of Rome. His research interest is in applied econometrics, with a special focus on causal inference, program evaluation, and machine learning applied to various fields of socio-economic science. Giovanni has developed original causal inference models, such as dose-response and treatment models with social interaction providing Stata implementation. He has developed around twenty Stata commands for casual inference and machine learning working also on Stata/Python/R integration for this purpose. Giovanni is author of the book Econometric Evaluation of Socio-Economic Programs: Theory and Applications (Springer, 2015; second edition 2022), and of the book Fundamentals of Supervised Machine Learning: with Applications in Python, R, and Stata (Springer, 2023). He has published his papers in several high-quality scientific journals, and is currently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics.

Emanuela Reale , sociologist, has been director of the Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth - IRCrES CNR until 2023 and currently is associate senior at IRCrES. Her research areas are higher education and research policies, with a focus on governance, R&D funding, research evaluation, STI indicators. Emanuela was principal researcher and coordinator of several international and national projects -most recent the RISIS European infrastructure for science technology and innovation research, the PRIN2017 on the effects of evaluation on the academic work, and the FOSSR PNRR-IR project. Emanuela is President of the European Forum for Studies on Research and Innovation Policies-EU-SPRI and co-Editor of Research Evaluation. Emanuela has published and is a reviewer in numerous international journals and books.