Where did you grow up ?
I was born and raised in Porto, Portugal.

What were your hobbies as a child ?
I used to spend a lot of hours playing football (soccer).

Where did you go to University ?
I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Porto and then my Masters in Bonn.

Where did you do your PhD ? 
I did my doctorate at the University of Bonn.

Who was your PhD Advisor ?
My thesis advisor was Moritz Schularick.

Any anecdote or memory from your time as PhD ?
At a certain point, you really understand how long it takes to write a paper and you start to despair a little bit.

What is your main research focus ?
The main focus of my research is to understand which factors determine real estate prices and why this matters for our daily lives.

What led you to start researching and teaching real estate finance ?
The fact that buildings can be both a consumption good and an investment asset makes real estate markets fascinating to study and teach from a financial perspective.

What current research work are you really excited about and why ?
Currently, I'm looking at how the ownership structure of the housing market affects a number of outcomes such as housing costs and tenure duration. I think we still know too little about landlords and how they operate.

What is the next research problem you plan to work on ?
In the future, I would like to focus more on sustainability issues in residential real estate markets. Buildings are one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and creating the right incentives to reduce these emissions is one of the biggest challenges we face today.

What attracted you to Switzerland, your local university and SFI ?
I think the excellence of the faculty in Zurich and at SFI, together with Switzerland's central location in Europe, played a decisive role in my decision to come here.

What languages do you speak ?
I speak Portuguese, German, English and French. I'm currently trying to learn the Swiss German accent.

What is your favorite quote ?
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."
― John Maynard Keynes