Jerome Roos is an LSE Fellow in International Political Economy (IPE) at the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the political economy and historical sociology of global capitalism, its crises and its contestation. Jerome holds a dual degree in International Political Economy from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to returning to LSE in January 2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge (2016-2018).

Jerome’s first book, based on his PhD thesis (2016) and forthcoming from Princeton University Press (2019), charts the long-term historical development of sovereign debt, cross-border lending and international crisis management — from the rise of public borrowing in the Italian city-states, through the era of imperialist finance and the mass defaults of the Great Depression, to the recent turmoil inside the Eurozone. Building on a comparative-historical analysis of the longue durée of international government finance and in-depth case studies of contemporary debt crises in Mexico (1982-1989), Argentina (1999-2002) and Greece (2010-2015), the book aims to explain why heavily indebted sovereign borrowers generally choose to honor their foreign obligations rather than default on them.

In addition to preparations for a second major book project on the making and remaking of the international economic order, Jerome is currently working on a number of journal articles on the international organization of sovereign debt, the structural power of finance, the historical evolution and distributional consequences of international crisis management, and the early stirrings of what appears to be a new emerging-market debt crisis. Beside this academic work, Jerome regularly contributes to various international media, including Al Jazeera English and BBC World.