The Centre for Finance and Development (CFD) serves as a leading international and interdisciplinary exchange platform in finance and development-related topics. It aims at strengthening the dialogue and cooperation among academics, international organisations, NGOs, diplomatic missions, financial institutions and the private sector.
The CFD occasionally hosts visiting fellows working on its area of focus. It also runs research projects and organises high level conferences and webinars on finance and development related topics. The Centre also offers an Executive Certificate in SDG Investing as well as different courses on finance and development.
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CURRENT Research areas include
Green and Sustainable Finance
A number of CFD affiliated researchers work on four areas related to sustainable finance. (i) The market for green sovereign bonds, (ii) The market for carbon offsets, (iii) The role of internal carbon pricing, (iv) and Blended finance.
Sovereign Debt
Ugo Panizza co-organizes DebtCon, the main international forum linking economists, legal scholars, political scientists and historians with debt-management practitioners. He also contributes to building the data the field lacks, including the African Debt Database and an instrument-level database of emerging-market bond issuance.
Finance, Growth, and the Role of the State
Ugo Panizza's research areas include the relationship between financial depth and growth turns negative once the financial sector becomes too large, bank ownership and state-owned banks, the effect of public borrowing on private investment, and the link between foreign direct investment, global value chains, and growth.
Capital and Economic Sovereignty
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen's current work explores why and how economic sovereignty emerges as a prominent economic imaginary that mobilizes aspirations and resources in the age of global financial capitalism, focusing on state-level experiments and popular practices that govern the ownership of economic institutions. She also examines how economic actors distinguish between different kinds of capital—domestic and foreign, public and private, patient and speculative—and what political and economic possibilities they attach to them.
Religion, Finance, and Economic Power
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen is currently carrying out a longitudinal study about the financial relationships connecting churches, banks, investors, and businesses in Ghana and across West Africa. Ethnographically, the study focuses on capital investments and the exchange of advice, ritual and people between churches and businesses over time. This project elicits the role of religious institutions in
accumulating, investing, and reallocating capital, and the public controversies their economic power generates.
FORMER RESEARCH AREAS
