Rodrigo Fernandez is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven for the project ‘The real estate/financial complex’, in which he is developing a comparative analytic framework to study the relationship between finance and real estate developments across different national institutional models. From 2011–2013, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where he carried out research on future scenarios for the Dutch welfare state post-financial crisis. In 2011 he finished his PhD (supervised by Ewald Engelen) at the University of Amsterdam on ‘Explaining the decline of the Amsterdam Financial Centre; globalizing finance and the rise of a hierarchical inter-city network’. Since 2011 he has been an associate researcher at SOMO, working on tax avoidance, tax havens and shadow banking.