Francesco Franco has been teaching at Nova School of Business and Economics since 2004. He earned his PhD in Economics from the Massachussets Institute of Technology. His research interests include fluctuations and applied macroeconomics, topics on which he has published in in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Empirical Finance and the International Review of Economics.  From October 2013 to June 2014 he became a member for a resident panel on European affairs for the Ministry of foreign affairs in Portugal. In 2016 Francesco Franco became a director of Jefferson Institute of Public Policy, a Portuguese think tank, and in May 2017 he became a member of the Portuguese Statistical Council. In 2020 he became the executive director of the Economics for Policy knowledge center.

He has been referee of various journals, among which the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Applied Economics and the Journal of the European Economic Association.