Heiko Hesse is an Economist in the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after having worked in the Middle East Department and on the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report. Prior to that, he was an Economist at the World Bank from 2006-2007 on the Commission on Growth and Development, which brought together twenty-one leading practitioners from government, business, and the policymaking arenas and was chaired by Nobel Laureate Michael Spence. Before that in 2005-2006, he was a Visiting Scholar at Yale University and a consultant at the World Bank. He also worked at McKinsey in their Financial Institutions Practice, NERA Economic Consulting as well as PwC. Some of his recent research involved systemic risk, sovereign wealth funds, spillovers to EM countries as well as Islamic finance. He has published in a number of refereed academic journals (e.g. Journal of Development Economics) and is a frequent speaker at central banks and conferences. Heiko obtained his PhD in Economics from Nuffield College, University of Oxford and his B.Sc. in Financial Economics from the University of Essex.

A native of Germany and Thailand, he is a former professional football player for Borussia Dortmund as well as one of the main actors in the German movie documentary "Die Champions" (2003) and the sequel "HalbZeit" (2010) by Adolf-Grimme-Prize Winner Christoph Hübner. In Washington DC, he is engaged in international and transatlantic issues as the President of the Washington European Society, a non-profit.