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.
Featured in: WEO October 2024 IMF [Local PDF], Boston Fed CPP 25-2, WEO October 2025 IMF [Local PDF]
July 2024
Pandemic broke everything, including models. Supply chains matter. Who knew? Global shocks spread faster now.
Slides: Pacific Basin Conference 2024
Featured in: Chapter 1 Economic Report of the President 2025
April 2023
Startups promise glory, deliver uncertainty. Career trajectories bend, not break. Entrepreneurship: the scenic route forward.
Publications
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2024
Commodity shocks ripple through networks. Production links amplify price swings. Small economies feel big impacts.
Slides: CEBRA
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2023
Recessions hit harder than booms. Network structure explains asymmetric pain. Downturns aren't just reverse expansions.
Comment: Saki Bigio
Featured in: Faculti
Empirical Economics, 2020
Price controls backfire spectacularly always. Hyperinflation makes everything extremely messy. Relative prices tell chaotic stories.
Applied Economics, 2017
Uncertainty paralyzes small open economies. Chile proves volatility matters tons. Policy makers hate this fact.
Other Publications
AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2023
Proceedings of the ECB Forum on Central Banking: "Challenges for Monetary Policy in a Rapidly Changing World", 2022
Featured in: Bloomberg, The Economist, Financial Times, NYFED Blog, VOXEU, Chair Powell's 2024 Jackson Hole Speech
Video: SINTRA Sebnem's Presentation
Slides: NBER IFM Meeting Fall 2022
Latin American Policy Journal, 2018
School Funding in Chile
In Ideas en Educación II: Definiciones en Tiempos de Cambio, 2018
Discussions
May 2025
System Committee on International Economic Analysis
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.
Kuina
Kuina & Zoro
Zoro