In 2012, Engel founded the think tank Espacio Público together with a multidisciplinary group of eighteen prominent experts, including the 2016 Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena, Chile's Central Bank former President José De Gregorio, economist Andrea Repetto and lawyer Nicole Nehme.

[9][10][11][12] Beginning in 2000, Engel began advocating changes to the legislation that regulates money in politics, through regular op-ed pieces [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] and as external adviser in a major project by the Chilean chapter of Transparency International.

[35] Yet it was in 2015, in the midst of a series of corruption scandals involving political and business leaders of the highest level, when he undertook a leading role in the design of and advocacy for anticorruption policies.

He created Espacio Público’s Anti-Corruption Observatory, a pioneering legislative monitoring initiative that employs a user-friendly online platform to assess the progress of the different proposals and triggers incidence actions to help them move forward.

[40] Engel has been invited to present this work at public events in Washington, DC,[41] Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Bogota.

Together with Ricardo Caballero, Engel received the 2002 Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society for their paper "Explaining Investment Dynamics in U.S. Manufacturing: A Generalized (S,s) Approach", Econometrica, 1999.