I am a tenured researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE(CSIC)) and Program Director for the Data Science for Decision Making M.Sc. at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). My CV can be found here.
My fields of interest are machine learning, political economy, development economics, conflict studies, and industrial organization. In my most recent research projects, I have analyzed how political institutions can make societies more robust, the channels through which violence affects the economy, how armed conflict can be predicted using millions of newspaper articles and how we can monitor building destruction using satellite images.
I am advising organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and foreign offices how to make better use of forecasts for decision making support. I am one of the principal investigators behind the research group EconAI which has the goal to provide decision making support based on quantitative data analysis. We have launched the conflict forecast webpage which delivers monthly updates on conflict risks worldwide. Other systems for displacement forecasting and de-democratization monitoring and forecasting are under development.
My work has been published in leading journals in economics and political science such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the American Economic Review (AER), the American Political Science Review (APSR), the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) and the American Journal of Economics: Macro (AEJ: Macro).
My main activity as is to conduct research on armed conflict, the economy and political institutions that drive our wellbeing. My research is quantitative and I am typically combining methods from several fields of machine learning, economics, political science and data science both in terms of empirical tools and theory.
Much of my most recent research is motivated by the enormous challenges posed by armed conflict. This is also why I am engaged in policy-oriented research for organizations like the UN, IMF, World Bank, Banco de España, FCDO (UK), the German Federal Foreign Office, WFP, CERF (OCHA) and the Universal Rights Group.
I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the London School of Economics in 2008. Since then I have been working at the Institute for Economic Studies (IAE(CSIC)) and became a tenured researcher at the institute in 2018. In 2019 I also became Associate Research Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics and in 2020 I became program director of the Data Science for Decision Making Masters at BSE. I am also affiliated with MOVE and CEPR.
Apart from my academic research I am trying to be useful by both teaching and providing policy-oriented research. I taught political economy at the IDEA program and political economy and data science at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). Currently I teach text mining and forecasting at the BSE.