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Welcome to my personal website.

Trained as a financial econometrician, I believe that financial markets, evidence-based research, and innovative ideas are keys to overcoming our world’s challenges. This inspires my work as a economist and researcher in sustainable finance. I'm currently consulting for the World Bank and the United Nations.

I specialize in sustainability-linked bonds, sovereign ESG, food insecurity, and financial stability. I explore these topics by applying econometrics and machine learning to various datasets, ranging from financial Bloomberg data to geospatial satellite data. I'm passionate about getting the key insights across with visualizations that tell a story.

I've collaborated with international organizations, central banks, global tech companies, major reinsurances, leading investment banks and even a space agency. I have held visiting positions at Columbia Business School and the Dutch Central Bank.

I first joined the Bank in 2018 during my doctoral studies and am currently consulting various units of the World Bank, such as the Long-Term Finance team, under the Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice. You can read up on my latest work on World Bank blogs. I have led the development of the new Sovereign ESG Data Portal.

Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs) are promising complements to labeled bonds, such as green bonds or social bonds. At the end of the day, issuers want to be sure that their efforts are adequately rewarded, and investors want to know that they are having a real impact. Otherwise, SLBs will face the same questions about greenwashing and additionality. A KPI based on a transparent, scientific model addresses these concerns by construction.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing has finally struck a chord with mainstream finance. With billions of dollars under sustainable management, ESG is no longer a niche topic but is becoming ordre du jour in the investment world. The scores, however, are not a one-fit-all solution for sustainability, especially on the country level. As part of the long-term finance team, I look at the ESG scores and use statistical methods to examine how they relate to national income, natural wealth or credit ratings.

As a modeling consultant for the Fragility, Conflict and Violence unit, I collaborated with leading insurance companies and global tech companies on the Famine Action Mechanism. In this project, I developed a stochastic model to understand and predict the population dynamics in food insecurity. See here (World Bank) and here (Washington Post) for press coverage of our project.