Laura Metzger

Laura Metzger is an Assistant Professor of Economics at William & Mary and Director of AidData’s Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) Unit, which develops innovative methods to track and analyze underreported financial flows from non-traditional donors to developing countries. She is also an affiliate researcher with the Development Economics Group at ETH Zurich.

Laura is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the use of data and evidence in policymaking, as well as the allocation and impact of development finance, with a particular emphasis on China’s overseas lending and grant-giving activities. Her work has been published in various academic journals, including World Development, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics.

Prior to joining William & Mary, she was an Assistant Professor in International Economics at Radboud University’s Nijmegen School of Management and a postdoctoral and affiliate researcher at the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at the Harvard Kennedy School. Outside academia, she has held policy roles with the Jacobs Foundation, the German Development Bank KfW, and GfA Consulting Group. Laura received her PhD in Development Economics from ETH Zurich.