ANOVA is led by researchers with over a decade of experience at the Inter-American Development Bank and peer institutions. Our teams are senior-led: the people who design the work are the people who do it.
Leadership
Omar Zambrano
Founder & Chief Economist
Omar Zambrano founded ANOVA in 2016 after eleven years at the Inter-American Development Bank, where he served as Senior Research Country Economist, leading macroeconomic and strategic policy dialogue with government authorities in Bolivia, Peru and the Dominican Republic. He began his career as a research economist at the Central Bank of Venezuela.
At ANOVA he has led every project the firm has taken on. The work covers impact evaluation and survey research, poverty, labour markets and migration, gender, education and health, urban regeneration, the economic impact of disasters and macroeconomic forecasting, in countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. He has been responsible for the firm’s institutional dialogue with multilateral organizations, national and local governments and NGOs.
He holds a Master in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and an MSc in Operational Research and a BA in Economics from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He is a doctoral researcher in Industrial Economics at the Universidad de Valencia, Adjunct Professor of Development Economics at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, and a member of LACEA and the IDB Research Network.
His academic work covers labour-market discrimination, poverty measurement, human capital, fiscal policy and the use of machine learning in economic measurement. He has also written widely for the press on economic and social policy. He leads ANOVA’s research agenda.
Hugo Hernández
Founder & Technical Director
Hugo Hernández leads ANOVA’s methodological work, from survey design and small-area estimation to field experiments and machine learning applied to satellite imagery. He is a co-author of the 2024 Labour Economics article on hiring discrimination against lesbian and gay job seekers in Ecuador, built on an artefactual field experiment with 394 human resource recruiters in Quito. He was also co-leader of a five-year research programme on discrimination with the Inter-American Development Bank, which applied field experiments in labour, rental housing and credit markets to groups that face discrimination, among them migrants, Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, women and people living in poverty.
As ANOVA’s technical lead, he has coordinated all of the firm’s projects. Their subjects include impact evaluation, survey design and fieldwork, poverty and labour markets, migration, gender, education and health, urban regeneration, the economic impact of disasters and macroeconomic forecasting. ANOVA has carried out projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Suriname, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia, among other countries. Earlier he led strategic analysis at the Municipality of Sucre, Caracas, and worked as a research assistant in health economics at the Bush School of Government and Public Service.
He holds a Master of Public Administration in public policy analysis from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University (2015) and a BA in Economics, cum laude, from the University of Texas of the Permian Basin (2012).
Research team
Oscar Soriano
Operations Manager
Gabriel Quiroz
Research Economist
Andrés Magallanes
Research Economist
Sebastián León
Associate Economist
Victoria Calderón
Associate Economist
Yza Toro
Associate Statistician
Sofía Maldonado
Research Intern