Nelson Ruiz

Nelson Ruiz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Senior Lecturer (~Associate Prof) and Head of the Political Economy Research Division at the Government Department at the University of Essex. He is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the LSE Government Department, an Associate Member at Nuffield College University of Oxford, and an Associate Member at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR). 

Before, he was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer at DPIR/Oxford and a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. Before that, he was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH-Zurich Public Policy Group (Chair: Dominik Hangartner), a fellow at Harvard-IQSS, and he was part of the Visiting Scholars Program at NYU-Politics department. He completed my PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

His research interests are in the political economy of development. Within this field, the main topic he is interested in is the role of money in politics. He is also interested in studying corruption and political selection. My research involves the use of causal inference methods and some data science tools.

Before academia, he worked at the Inter-American Development Bank as a research fellow evaluating development projects in the field across Latin America.