My research explores how business interests shape public policy, with a focus on state–business relations, collective action, and the role of business associations as intermediary actors in Latin America and the European Union. I am particularly interested in how firms’ organisational choices and political strategies influence fiscal policymaking, labour market inequality, and broader patterns of development.
My current project, with colleague from LSE International Inequalities Institute, is “Proposing and Passing: Business Associations, Right-Wing Governments and Equity-Enhancing Reform in Latin America”. It asks whether Latin America’s right-wing governments draft what organised business asks for. No existing dataset could answer that, so we built one: an original corpus of 9,500 executive bills, 11,400 laws and the documents of 75 business associations across 18 countries, coded with a validated open-weight language-model protocol. The corpus is assembled, the analysis is in progress, and we are extending the collection to Europe.
I have held visiting researcher positions at INSPER, Universidade de São Paulo, Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil), FLACSO (Ecuador), and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina).
I teach quantitative methods and AI for social science to postgraduate students at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in a research methods module I designed, and I supervise five Master’s dissertations there.
In 2025 I was Associate Lecturer in Latin American Political Economy at UCL’s Institute of the Americas, where I designed and led the Political Economy of Economic Development module for second- to fourth-year undergraduates. Between 2017 and 2019 I taught seminars at UCL, on the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences, at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and at the Institute of the Americas, and at the University of Leicester.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), awarded by Advance HE in November 2026. I received the UCL Provost Education Award and the UCL Education Award in 2019.
Published
Kingstone, P., Maghin, H., and Renon, E. (2018). Chapter 5: Latin America's Golden Era? In The Political Economy of Latin America: Reflections on Neoliberalism and Development after the Commodity Boom. New York: Routledge.
Under review
Kopp, P. and Renon, E. The Impact of a Remuneration Reform on the French Tobacco Market and National Consumption. Under review at Tobacco Control.
Renon, E. Young Democracies' Regionalization Trap. Under review at Electoral Studies.
Renon, E. Who Speaks for Business? Firm Size, Collective Action, and the Policy Choices of Business Associations in Brazil and Colombia. Under review at Latin American Politics and Society.
Renon, E. The Workflow Is the Assessment: Controllable AI Use and Reproducibility in Teaching Quantitative Research. In revision for Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
Work in Progress
Renon, E. Interrupted Choice: What Dictatorship and Populism Do to the Party Options Latin American Voters Have.
Renon, E. The Question Belongs to Its Author: Student-Designed Summative Essay Questions and Attainment in an Undergraduate Politics Module.