Michael Lokshin is Lead Economist with the Office of the Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia, at the World Bank. Prior to that, Michael was a Lead Economist and Manager in the Development Data Group of the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 after which he joined the research group at the World Bank as a Young Economist (YE program). His research focuses on the areas of poverty and inequality measurement, labor economics, and applied econometrics. More recently he has been involved in the Bank's efforts to develop the methodology of evaluating the effect of crisis and public policies on households in developing countries. He also leads the group of researchers in development of the Software Platform for Automated Economic Analysis (ADePT).