About

I am a PhD candidate in Finance at the University of Groningen, and I am on the job market in 2026–2027. My single-authored job market paper is Not in My Backyard: Portfolio Allocation under Water Scarcity.

I study how financial markets respond to water scarcity. Water is a vital input to production, and it is increasingly scarce. I work on whether markets price that as a risk, how it affects portfolio allocation, and whether financial pressure changes how firms use water.

Answering these questions requires a dataset that did not yet exist, so I built it. It follows water wherever it flows, above ground and below, past the firms that draw on it, and up to the investors who own them.

Before starting my PhD, I obtained an MSc in Finance and Investments and a BSc in International Business Administration from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a BA in Philosophy from KU Leuven. In 2025, I spent six months as a visiting researcher at Monash University in Melbourne.

t.de.waal@rug.nl · SSRN · LinkedIn