Fernando Alvarez

Who is Fernando Alvarez?

Fernando Enrique Alvarez is an Argentine macroeconomist. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. in Economics at Universidad Nacional de La Plata in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2008.

Fernando Alvarez's most influential contribution seems to be his work with Urban Jermann on endogenously incomplete markets. They show how the limited commitment model of Kehoe and David Levine and also of Narayana Kocherlakota can be decentralized with certain borrowing constraints. They also showed how this model could explain some feature of asset prices, such as the equity premium. Several papers have used their model later on to explain other macroeconomic phenomena.

Fernando Alvarez has also presented a new estimate of the welfare cost of business cycles, which is based on observed asset prices. His other work includes models of monetary economies with segmented markets and search models with incomplete markets.