I am an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Political Science. I am also a visiting fellow at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, a policy fellow at Dezernat Zukunft: Institute for Macrofinance and a member of the European Parliament’s monetary policy expert panel. These are some of the topics that I do research on.

Finance and distributive Justice

My background is in philosophy and in 2018 I completed a PhD dissertation at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge titled ‘How to make money: Distributive justice, finance, and monetary constitutions’.  It studies the institution of money from the perspective of theories of distributive justice. I argue that because political philosophy has given insufficient attention to money and finance, it lacks adequate normative concepts to respond to the ever-growing role of finance in advanced capitalist economies. I highlight the uniquely powerful role of the private banking system and argue for democratic oversight of money creation. The dissertation won the Society for Business Ethics’ Best Dissertation Award. You can find a short summary here.

Central bank operations and the history of market neutrality

I left philosophy and wrote a second PhD dissertation with the title “The Political Economy of Central Bank Risk Management” at the Department of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. In the dissertation, I chart the role of changing approaches to financial risk management in shaping operations at the European Central Bank before and during the Eurozone crisis. The research draws on a wide range of research methods. I have analysed macroeconomic and financial data, conducted interviews with central bankers, visited archives and reviewed central bank policy documents regulations and policy documents from the late 80s to the present. Drawing on all these sources, I describe how the ECB initially treats financial risk as a purely technical issue, which it deals with using commercial risk-management strategies. These approaches, however, turned out to be inadequate for dealing with the post-2008 crises. Despite gradual evolution, older conceptions of risk retain their influence over the ECB and, so I argue, hinder more effective crisis and environmental policies. A dissertation chapter on sovereign debt, the ECB collateral framework and the eurozone crisis is available here and another on market neutrality is available here (co-authored with Clément Fontan).

Technocratic legitimacy

The governance of the financial system is today largely insulated from effective oversight by parliaments and other democratic fora. Where an existing body of work shows that central bank roles have transformed dramatically after the 2007-8 crisis, my work articulates a critical perspective on these developments from a perspective of democratic legitimacy. I have published on the ethics delegating monetary policy, on John Rawls and central banking, and (often with Nik de Boer and Seraina Grünewald) on the European Central Bank’s democratic accountability and legitimacy. I have also written on the perceived democratic gap in the EU’s economic governance structure and on the institutions of global financial governance. In recent articles on technocratic Keynesianism and central bank support for government debt, I study how changing economic ideas have led central bankers and EU technocrats to pursue radically new policies within the old constitutional structures of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. A chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory on central banking outlines the current state of affairs on these topics for political theorists and legal scholars.

The financial system and the environment

A major part of the European Union’s current efforts to achieve its climate and biodiversity objectives consists in policies to “green” the financial system. How should central banks and regulators take into account the EU’s climate transition? To what extent do the European Central Bank’s monetary policy operations support or hinder the EU’s ambition to renovate 35 million houses until 2030? What would be obstacles to more close coordination from a perspective of legality, legitimacy and subsidiarity? As part of this project, I study the political dynamics that govern EU climate policies while also devising innovative institutional proposals.  In 2020 I co-authored a proposal for green TLTROs, which outlines how the ECB can use support the green transition through the design of its refinancing operations. The ECB discussed the proposal as part of its 2021 and 2025 strategy review, Christine Lagarde repeatedly expressed support and even the French President Emmanuel Macron came out in favour. With Nik de Boer and Seraina Grünewald, I have also proposed to coordinate monetary policy with the broader EU economic agenda  (the EP followed some of our suggestions for this in February 2022). With Agnieszka Smoleńska and others I try to figure out how the EU’s climate transition should inform the prudential framework for banks (see outputs here, here and here).

The international role of the euro

Building on these earlier interests, I am currently studying how the EU should position its currency in an increasingly multi-polar order. More widespread use of the euro has long been a goal for EU policymakers, but progress has been slow. In a new paper with Steffen Murau, we offer a fresh explanation for why the euro remains weak internationally. We draw on recent International Political Economy research to develop a new framework for understanding currency internationalisation. We argue that for a currency to go global, governments must actively support the creation of private credit money in that currency outside their borders (“offshore” creation). EU policymakers have treated internationalisation as something markets would do on their own, ignoring this offshore dimension. As a result, they have discouraged—rather than promoted—the spread of the euro abroad.  The US, meanwhile, is increasingly weaponising the US dollar for its own national and commercial interests. In a recent report for the European Parliament we study the rise of USD stablecoins, new forms of digital money pushed forward by the current US administration.