Dr. Natascha van der Zwan is an Associate Professor in Public Administration at Leiden University. She does comparative and historical research on financialization and the welfare state, pension investment rules and regulations, and sustainable finance. Her work has been published in, among others, Socio-Economic Review, New Political Economy, European Journal of Social Policy, and by Routledge and Amsterdam University Press. She is an Editorial Board member of the journals Competition & Change and Socio-Economic Review.

Her article “Making Sense of Financialization” (Socio-Economic Review, 2014) is a key publication in scholarship on financialization. It is one of the most cited papers on financialization and it is widely used in university courses. Dr. Van der Zwan is one of the co-editors of the Routledge International Handbook of Financialization (2020) and serves as an external advisor to several national and international research projects and organizations.

In her home country of the Netherlands, Dr. Van der Zwan is a recognized expert on private pensions. She regularly advises politicians and policymakers on pension policy and she is a frequent contributor to the public debate on the future of the Dutch pension system.

In 2020, Dr. Van der Zwan was awarded a prestigious NORFACE grant for a multi-year international research project on the “democratic governance of funded pension schemes” (DEEPEN), together with three co-applicants (Karen Anderson, Juan Fernandez, Tobias Wiss). The project investigates how governments, regulators and labor market actors in six European countries govern funded pensions, coupled with a large cross-national survey on member preferences.

Dr. Van der Zwan holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the New School for Social Research.