Nearly three years of analytical work across banking, technology and automotive manufacturing, now focused on finance. At Renault Group / HORSE I do the cost and margin analysis behind engine, gearbox and hybrid powertrain offers, and I build the tools that make that work faster.
Portfolio covered by my cost and margin analysisRenault Group / HORSE~€2bn
Pricing lines broken down line by line1,200+
Supplier savings identified€4–5m
Won offers I priced or supportedRenault, Dacia, Nissan20
Hours saved per year by Atlas, a tool I built~2,350
Contract behind a new market I identifiedART Computer, Geneva~CHF 200k
Experience
Renault Group / HORSE
Sep 2025 – present
Pricing analyst, internship
Alcobendas, Spain
Build line-by-line cost breakdowns (materials, labour, overhead) for engines, gearboxes and hybrid powertrains, covering 1,200+ pricing lines on a ~€2bn portfolio, and write up cost distribution, trends and projections.
Run sensitivity analyses on inflation, FX and commodity prices with Bloomberg data, and build margin bridges between offer versions to anticipate margin erosion over a programme's life.
Set prices and support negotiations to reach the profitability target: 20 won offers with Renault, Dacia and Nissan so far, and €4–5m in supplier savings identified.
Present monthly Power BI margin reports to sales management.
Reconcile SAP cost data with pricing files, and use Copilot-based AI agents to extract, check and clean the input data sent by Key Account Managers.
Created Atlas, a Power Apps tool used by about 50 people to consolidate pricing data, with consistency checks on every entry.
Time to prepare one offer, as a margin bridge. Used by about 50 people, Atlas saves about 2,350 hours a year.
ART Computer
Sep 2022 – Aug 2023
Business and market analyst, internship
Geneva, Switzerland
Analysed B2B markets and customer segments for an Apple Premium Partner of about 60 people, to find growth beyond its established education business.
Identified the printing industry as an untapped market, ranked target companies by IT needs, found the decision-makers and built the business case behind a ~CHF 200,000 contract.
Tracked commercial activity, opportunities and KPIs, and structured them for management decisions.
BNP Paribas Fortis
Dec 2021 – Jun 2022
Credit risk analyst, internship
Brussels, Belgium
Analysed SME financial statements and restated them in a standard format to calculate comparable ratios.
Assessed credit applications with the bank's scoring model, looking at leverage, interest coverage and cash flow to judge repayment capacity.
Flagged indicators that needed review, prepared credit files for senior analysts' lending decisions and co-wrote credit notes.
Skills
Finance
Cost and margin analysis
Margin bridges
Sensitivity analysis: inflation, FX, commodities
Pricing and negotiation support
Financial statement analysis
Credit risk assessment
Reporting and automation
Power BI
Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse
Copilot-based AI agents
SAP cost data reconciliation
Data and code
Excel: XLOOKUP, VBA, Power Query, Power Pivot
Bloomberg
SQL
Python, R, Stata
JavaScript
Education
CFA Program, Level I candidateMay 2027CFA Institute
Master in Economic Development and Growth2024 – 2025 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, cum laude
Master in Population and Development Sciences2021 – 2024 UCLouvain, magna cum laude, with an exchange semester at the University of Geneva
Bachelor in Economics and Management2017 – 2021 Université de Namur
The research behind these degrees is on the academic side: press 2.
Languages
French native
English C2
Spanish C1
Dutch B2
Outside work
Treasury support for a small film production company.
Monthly science talks for primary school children in Wallonia.
Exoplanet observation campaigns with the Royal Observatory of Belgium, and a lot of astrophotography: press 3.
I am an economist working on development economics and economic history. My two master's theses come at development from opposite ends: a counterfactual, selection-corrected study of how remittances affect poverty and inequality in Albania, and a historical and epistemological review of how development studies have understood the informal economy. Before them, I spent six months in the Geneva archives helping build a historical demography database. Today I use econometrics and time series every day as a pricing analyst at Renault Group. This page sets out that work, and what I could bring to a research team.
I started economics at seventeen without a clear idea of what I was getting into. The first years were mostly models and equations. Then three courses changed my view, one on poverty, one on agriculture and one on development, and economics became what it still is for me: a social science, a way to understand how people live, how they change over time, and why the world looks the way it does today.
My master's in population and development sciences added psychology, sociology, anthropology and history to that. History is the one that stayed with me, which is how I ended up in the Geneva archives (Section 3). The two theses that followed (Section 2) taught me what I think the analytical skill really is: framing a question well, choosing a method that fits it, reading the results honestly and being able to defend them.
2Two theses, two methods
2.1Remittances and poverty in Albania
Remittances account for a significant share of Albania's GDP, yet their direct effect on poverty and inequality had not been measured rigorously. In Ismajli (2025), my thesis at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid supervised by Jordi Domenech Feliu (grade 17/20), I ask what that effect really is.
the quantitative one: survey microdata + econometricsFollowing the counterfactual approach of Richard H. Adams, Jr., I estimate each household's welfare without remittances with a multinomial logit model and the Dubin–McFadden selection correction, using the 2012 Living Standards Measurement Survey, the last one available for Albania. Comparing this counterfactual with observed welfare isolates the effect of internal and international remittances on poverty (Foster–Greer–Thorbecke indices) and inequality (Gini), which I then break down by remittance type, rural or urban location, gender of the household head and access to infrastructure.
Remittances reduce poverty on every dimension: incidence falls by 18.0% when both types are combined (Table 1). International transfers do most of the work; for the poorest households that receive them, they cover 57.8% of expenditure. But they also raise the Gini index by 20.9%, because the largest transfers go to middle- and upper-income households. Their poverty effect is strongest where the state and local labour markets offer least: −26.0% for female-headed households and −24.6% in mountainous regions.
Table 1: Poverty and inequality under counterfactual scenarios
Scenario
IncidenceFGT0
DepthFGT1
SeverityFGT2
Gini
Panel A: levels
No remittances
11.1%
3.18%
1.75%
0.177
Internal remittances
10.3%
2.96%
1.67%
0.176
International remittances
9.6%
2.72%
1.51%
0.214
Both
9.1%
2.58%
1.46%
0.215
Panel B: change relative to no remittances
Internal remittances
−7.2%
−6.8%
−4.9%
−0.9%
International remittances
−13.7%
−14.5%
−13.8%
+20.9%
Both
−18.0%
−18.9%
−16.4%
+21.2%
less poverty, more inequality
Notes: statistics weighted with household survey weights. Source: Ismajli (2025), Table 4.6, computed from the 2012 Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey.
2.2The popular economy
the qualitative one: history of development thoughtClose to two billion people work in the informal economy (ILO, 2018), and every way of theorising informality has turned into development policies that shape their daily lives. Yet after decades of such policies, informality has barely changed. In Ismajli (2024), my thesis at UCLouvain, written in French and supervised by Andreia Lemaître and María José Ruiz Rivera (grade 15/20), I ask whether the Latin American concept of economía popular marks a real epistemological break with the informal economy.
Reviewing four schools of development thought from the late nineteenth century to today (modernist, dualist, neoliberal and structuralist), I identify three assumptions they share: a developmentalist logic, a global approach that overlooks individual realities, and a binary opposition between the formal and the informal. The popular economy of José Luis Coraggio and Luis Razeto challenges all three. It puts the actor at the centre of the analysis and treats the diversity of economic practices as something to understand, not an anomaly to correct.
3Six months in the Geneva archives
In autumn 2022 I followed the Master in Economic History at the University of Geneva on exchange, and from September 2022 to February 2023 I worked as a research data collector at the Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History, on a historical demography database of Geneva between 1800 and 1880.
I worked from primary records in the archives (population censuses, marriage and divorce records, residence permits), coded each person's occupation, location and household structure, and linked records across sources into a panel dataset ready for analysis. It was slow, careful work, and I loved it. It taught me that before any analysis, there is the patient job of understanding the sources and turning them into data you can trust.
4Methods and tools
Econometrics. Cross-section and maximum likelihood methods (OLS/GLS, MLE, GMM); discrete choice and selection models (logit, probit, multinomial logit, Heckman, Dubin–McFadden); causal inference (IV, difference-in-differences, matching); panel data; time series (unit roots, VAR, cointegration).
Data. Household survey microdata (LSMS), census and archival records, historical panel data, macroeconomic and financial series (Bloomberg, commodity and FX prices), SQL databases, record linkage, data harmonisation and pipeline automation.
In practice. At Renault Group I price five- to eight-year contracts for engines, gearboxes and production lines, in markets where costs and currencies keep moving. I build time series of raw materials, part costs, exchange rates and macroeconomic factors, estimate econometric models for each cost driver, and use them to build pricing scenarios and stress tests.
5Teaching and outreach
I have tutored economics and mathematics for years, for secondary school and university students. With my astronomy group I also give a science talk in a primary school in Wallonia once a month.3 Explaining a light curve to a nine-year-old is a very good test of whether you really understand it yourself, and adapting an explanation to the person in front of you is a skill in itself.
References
Ismajli, L. (2024). L'économie populaire : une nouvelle perspective épistémologique de l'économie informelle dans les sciences du développement. Master's thesis, UCLouvain.
Ismajli, L. (2025). Remittances and Poverty in Albania. Master's thesis, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Full texts available on request.
ADegrees and languages
2024–2025
Master in Economic Development and Growth (MEDEG), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, cum laude.
2021–2024
Master in Population and Development Sciences, UCLouvain, magna cum laude; exchange in the Master in Economic History, University of Geneva, autumn 2022.
2017–2021
Bachelor in Economics and Management, Université de Namur.
Languages
French (native), English (C2), Spanish (C1), Dutch (B2).
Photographing the night sky takes whole nights. Keeping the photos online at full resolution costs more than I can pay for right now, so for the moment they live on Instagram.
Since 2023 I have also led a five-person citizen-science team with the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Twice a year we travel abroad, to Morocco or Norway, to watch exoplanets pass in front of their stars. We extract the light curves, and once validated they go to ExoClock in support of ESA's Ariel mission.
Once a month I talk about all this in primary schools across Wallonia. Explaining a light curve to a nine-year-old is a very good test of whether you really understand it yourself.
