Tiago
Freire, PhD

I'm Tiago, but you can call me James or 雅格. I am a published, award winning, quantitative economist, with 10+ years of experience in data analysis and 5+ years of experience in finance. I am an expert in using economic modeling and data science to analyze large, complex datasets.

My career intersects academia and industry. After completing my undergraduate degree in Economics, I started my career in finance, working for a European stock broker as a financial analyst and had the opportunity to feature in several TV interviews. To further my skills, I did a Master degree in the UK and earned a scholarship to do my PhD in Economics in the US at Brown University, where I worked in John Vernon Henderson in a NSF and NIH funded project on the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, that included field work in Aceh, Indonesia. In my thesis I analyzed big data, the Brazilian Census micro data for 1980, 1991 and 2000, using Stata and Matlab and I worked as a short-term consultant on Brazil at the World Bank. After completing my PhD I worked at the National University of Singapore, where I received several awards for my research, and moved for a better position at the International Business School Suzhou of XJTLU in China teaching advanced macroeconomics and quantitative methods and published several papers on top journals such as The World Bank Economic Review , Annals of Regional Science and Food Policy .

In 2015 I returned to finance and joined a startup hedge fund in New York City, where I developed and coded in R, Python and SQL several of our analytical tools, such as our nowcasting/forecasting model, risk model, alternative data harvesting and alternative data analytics including machine learning company sales forecasting. In 2020, I joined PwC as a Data Scientist deloping and deploying data products at scale. My efforts focused on three projects: (i) Behavioral Analytics - identifying entities in a computer network; (ii) Network Resilience using Graph Analysis - measuring the ability of a computer network to resit to attacks; (iii) Cloud entities - building a data pipeline collecting information from public cloud providers into our platform. In 2022 I returned to finance and joined Moody's Investors Service.