Biography

João Rafael Cunha is an empirical economist with research interests in financial and monetary economics. He is a PhD candidate in International Economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Prior to joining the EUI, he has been a Researcher at the University of Cambridge and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at The London School of Economics.Joao’s research looks at the political economy of financial regulation. In particular, he tries to explain how financial regulation is produced. The main motivation for it is to try to understand why it is that, even though we have a large strand of literature describing what optimal financial regulation is, we keep having financial crises at least partially caused by poor regulation. For this purpose, Joao looks at the role different inputs play in the production of financial regulation and tries to find out which are the variables relevant for this production.His research interests include finance, monetary economics, international macroeconomics and finance, macroeconomics, and financial and monetary history.Currently, Joao is working on two projects. In one, he is trying to better understand the interaction between market structure and regulation on the banking system and figure out what the consequences of this interaction are for the financial system, its stability and the impact on the real economy. On the other project, he is also studying the credit cycles and the impact these have on the economy and the business cycle.Joao has teaching experience in Finance and Macroeconomics at the undergraduate level.