I was selected as a permanent Univesrity Lecturer in World Politics with a focus on International Political Economy in summer 2020. I started in this new role with a two-year research leave, as the EU had granted me a two-year research fellowship to visit the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn Univeristy of Technology. In Tallinn, my reserach focused on the commercialization of residency-related rights, with a specific focus on the Estonian e-residency system.

In years 2023–2025, I'm Principal Investigator in the reserach project Big Tech and the EU (https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/projects/big-tech-and-the-eu-bit-eu), which is funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

An important current of my scholarship has focused on how private actors influence politics at different domains, ranging from the mechanisms of corporate tax planning to the influence of management consultants and Public Affairs companies in governance from national to global arenas. I have also published several articles and books related to global development policy and its economic governance. I am interested in supervising PhD dissertations in related fields.

I defended my PhD in World Politics in the summer of 2018, with a dissertation that analyzed the politics of corporate tax avoidance. University of Helsinki granted its annual dissertation award to the thesis. Moreover, Yale University awarded its 2015 Amartya Sen Prize to one of the articles of the dissertation. In addition to my current fellowship at Tallinn, I spent year 2016 at Yale University as a Fulbright grantee. I hold a position of a Non-resident Fellow at Yale.

Office hours by appointment. Please note that my email address is matti.v.ylonen@helsinki.fi (i.e., there is a latter v in between).