I hold an ICREA Research Professorship at the Economics Department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Since 2004, I've been a research associate at the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI) at UPF. My area of specialization is economic history. Principal areas of research include long-run economic growth, financial history, the political causes of  asset price volatility, German interwar economic history, and the economic history of the Industrial Revolution. My research has been published, inter alia, by Oxford University Press, as well as in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Economic Growth, the European Economic Review, and Explorations in Economic History. The Economist, the New York Times, the Financial Times Deutschland, Handelsblatt and De Volkskraat have profiled research articles or books.

I was educated in Bonn, Freiburg, St. Antony's College, Oxford, the European University Institute (EUI), and Nuffield College, Oxford. I'm a Research Fellow in the International Macro Program at the CEPR (London), have held visiting appointments at the MIT Economics Department, Princeton, at NYU-Stern and at the Stanford Economics Department, and I have been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, RSSS, ANU, Canberra, Australia and at Nuffield College, Oxford, as well a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. From 1999 to 2001, I served as the Associate Director at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge. After finishing my doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1996, I worked for a while as a Senior Associate for McKinsey & Co., Munich. I've also advised Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt, and McKinsey & Co., Germany.

I was recently awarded an Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). In 2001, I became one of the first four economists in Britain to win a Philip Leverhulme Prize. For my work, I've received the EHA's Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, the Gino Luzzatto Prize from the European Historical Economics Society, and a Ramon y Cajal research distinction from the Spanish Ministry of Education.

 

[a more extensive description of my work was profiled on EH.Net]