Alvaro Silva

Alvaro Silva

I am an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. I work on international economics.

Here are my CV and CV of failures.

My Boston Fed website is here.

Feel free to reach me at: asilvub@gmail.com

X: @asilvub

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System.

Working Papers

December 2025. First draft: December 2025.
Networks doom economies, surprisingly often. Wrong friends make crises worse. Diagonal economies collapse harder, basically.
November 2025. First draft: November 2025.
Trade wars strike back harder. Firms remember 2018, still unprepared. Ten-fold exposure this round.
September 2024. First draft: October 2023.
Small countries, big inflation problems. Sectors matter more than expected. Aggregation hides the messy truth.
July 2024
Pandemic broke everything, including models. Supply chains matter. Who knew? Global shocks spread faster now.
April 2023
Startups promise glory, deliver uncertainty. Career trajectories bend, not break. Entrepreneurship: the scenic route forward.

Publications

with Caraiani, Miranda-Pinto, and Olaya-Agudelo
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2024
Commodity shocks ripple through networks. Production links amplify price swings. Small economies feel big impacts.
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2023
Recessions hit harder than booms. Network structure explains asymmetric pain. Downturns aren't just reverse expansions.
with Cerda and Luders
Empirical Economics, 2020
Price controls backfire spectacularly always. Hyperinflation makes everything extremely messy. Relative prices tell chaotic stories.
with Cerda and Valente
Applied Economics, 2017
Uncertainty paralyzes small open economies. Chile proves volatility matters tons. Policy makers hate this fact.

Other Publications

School Funding in Chile
with Urzua
In Ideas en Educación II: Definiciones en Tiempos de Cambio, 2018

Discussions

by Flaaen, Kamal, Lee and Yi
May 2025
by Cuba-Borda, Queralto, Reyes-Heroles, and Skaramucci
August 2025

Datasets

I helped to construct two economic uncertainty indices for Chile prior to my Ph.D. I am not in charge of updating them anymore but they are regularly updated. Feel free to use them and remember to cite our work!

Cats

Here are some pictures of our cats Kuina and Zoro. Yep, we like One Piece! Coincidentally, Zoro was almost blind in one eye when we adopted him.