After completing a BA at the Hebrew University, I worked as a tour guide in China, India, and Nepal. I was in Southeast Asia during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997-98. In 1998, I moved to study International Economics at the University of California in Santa Cruz (PhD, 2003). My dissertation, on financial crises, was written under the supervision of Michael Hutchison. 

In 2003, I began working at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, I began to focus more of my research on disasters. After a decade in Hawai'i, I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, and have since been the Te Āwhionukurangi Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. In 2017, I founded a new journal, Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, with Shunsuke Managi. Since 2024, I have also held an appointment as a Professor of Applied Economics at the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila, Italy.