Earth observation
Using satellite imagery to observe economic activity at a spatial and temporal resolution that traditional statistics cannot always capture.
Satellite imageryComputer visionGeospatial data
Economist × Data Scientist · Paris
I turn unusual data into economic signals.
I’m Marwan Menaa, a PhD Candidate at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and Banque de France. My research sits where economic measurement meets satellite imagery, textual analysis, generative AI, and large-scale data systems.
PROFILE / 001Researching now
PhD CandidateEconomics + AI
SIGNAL PIPELINE
Raw tracesModelsIndicators
Thesis
Alternative Data as New Indicators for Economic Analysis
Satellite imageryText as dataGenerative AIEconomic measurementData engineeringMachine learning
01 / Research lens
Making the invisible measurable.
Official statistics give us the map. Alternative data can reveal the movement in between—faster, more granular, and from entirely new angles.
Text as data
Transforming large collections of news, narratives, and unstructured documents into interpretable measures of perceptions and expectations.
NLPSentiment17M+ articles
AI for measurement
Combining machine learning and generative AI with economic validation to build indicators that are timely, robust, and useful for decisions.
Generative AIMachine learningEconometrics
MY RESEARCH LOOP
From messy, high-volume traces to signals that can survive economic scrutiny.
- 01Collectimages · text · market data
- 02Engineerpipelines · APIs · databases
- 03ModelNLP · ML · generative AI
- 04Validateeconometrics · robustness
- 05Translateindicators · decisions
02 / Selected work
Research with a real-world pulse.
FLAGSHIP RESEARCH2026
LLM CLASSIFICATION × BERT FINE-TUNING
Newsflation
A Multilingual LLM-Based News Indicator of Euro Area Inflationary Pressures
A 27B-parameter LLM labels multilingual news, then a fine-tuned EuroBERT classifier scales the signal to 17 million articles in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The resulting index tracks euro-area inflation expectations out of sample.
Open access
0.916 accuracyρ = 0.78 survey correlation
RESEARCH TOOL · 2026
OpenRePEc
Search economics research across working papers, journal articles, books, and chapters from the RePEc network—by title, author, affiliation, keyword, and JEL code.
Search OpenRePEcRESEARCH TOOL · 2025
ConfWatcher
A tool built with Jean-Charles Bricongne, Diyar Can, and Guillaume de Rouville to make economics conference and special-issue discovery more efficient and transparent.
Visit ConfWatcherWORKING PAPER · 2023
Inflation perceptions in the French press
Natural language processing applied to a near-universe of French newspaper articles from 2004-2022 to measure inflation attention and perceptions among households and firms.
Read Working Paper 921PHD RESEARCH · ONGOING
Alternative Data as New Indicators for Economic Analysis
Doctoral research supervised by Sylvain Benoit (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL) and Thomas Renault (Université Paris-Saclay), with Jean-Charles Bricongne as advisor, at the intersection of academic research and central banking.
Ask me about the research03 / Toolkit
Fluent from the model to the pipeline.
$ inspect toolkit
- languages
- Python · Julia · R · SQL · MATLAB
- ml / ai
- PyTorch · scikit-learn · NLP · Generative AI
- data
- Big Data · APIs · MySQL · Web scraping
- economics
- Econometrics · Macro · Fixed income · Market data
● ready to turn noise into signal
17M+press articles managed and analysed for inflation research
I enjoy the whole chain: framing the economic question, engineering the data, building the model, stress-testing the result, and explaining what it means.
04 / Journey
Economics, markets, and code.
A path through central banking, capital markets, engineering, and research—each adding a different lens on how data becomes a decision.
2024 — now
PhD Candidate in Economics
Université Paris Dauphine-PSL × Banque de France
CIFRE thesis · LEDa · Alternative Data as New Indicators for Economic Analysis
2023 — 2024
Capital Markets — Off-Cycle Intern
Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets
Rates, FX & commodities derivatives · Pricing · XVA automation
2022 — 2023
Monetary Policy Trainee
European Central Bank
Market-data infrastructure · Economic projections · Monetary analysis
2021
Economist / Data Scientist Intern
Banque de France
News-based inflation indicators · NLP · Country-risk sentiment analysis
05 / Teaching
Teaching data with economic intuition.
Courses that connect rigorous foundations with the tools, data, and decisions students will encounter in practice.
Currently teachingM1 · Graduate
Université Paris Dauphine-PSL
Data Management
Master 1 IEF — Ingénierie économique et financière
Data workflowsDatabasesEconomic data
September — November 2025L3 · Undergraduate
Université Paris-Saclay
Financial Markets
Core concepts, instruments, and the economic logic behind how financial markets operate.
MarketsInstrumentsFinance
06 / Open channel
Have an interesting signal?
I’m always happy to discuss research, data, economics, or the odd dataset that might tell us something new.
The address is assembled only when you click, which makes bulk scraping less useful.