Jose Ferrer
I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Virginia.
I previously worked as a research assistant at the International Monetary Fund. I hold a MSc degree in economics from Georgetown University and a BA in Business and Economics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile.
In the Fall of 2024 I received the Jackson Farrell Endowed Graduate Fellowship recognizing excellence in graduate research and academic achievements (article). During the Summer of 2025 I was a Dissertation Fellow at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC.
My fields of research are macroeconomics, international finance, and monetary economics.
I am on the 2025-2026 job market.
You can find my CV here.
Research
Job Market Paper
I develop a framework of monetary, fiscal, and capital account interactions for small open economies (SOEs) to study how the price level and exchange rate are determined under different policy contexts. I identify three policy regimes where the equilibrium is uniquely determined and explore implications for inflation dynamics. The first two regimes generalize well-known monetary and fiscal dominance regimes by adding a condition that capital account policies, defined as interventions to the country's capital account, are consistent with external solvency. The third regime---capital account dominance---arises when capital account policy targets the (real) exchange rate, thereby uniquely determining the price level. This causes inflation to be driven by current account imbalances rather than by monetary or fiscal policy, thus offering a new view of how policy can control inflation in a SOE. I highlight two important implications for the conduct of monetary policy in SOEs: (i) achieving price stability requires both fiscal and capital account policy backing, and (ii) strict inflation targeting and managed exchange rates are inconsistent with intertemporal current account solvency. Lastly, as an application, I provide narrative and empirical evidence that Chile was a case of capital account dominance during the late 1980s.
Working Papers
Macroeconomic Transmission of (Un-) Predictable Uncertainty Shocks
with John Rogers and Jiawen Xu (CBMM slides)
We document significant upward bias in estimates of the transmission of uncertainty shocks to real activity found in prominent studies of uncertainty's macroeconomic transmission. We show this bias is due to predictability in these uncertainty shocks. The predictability stems not from the use of ex-post revised data rather than real-time data, but from failure to control for uncertainty's endogenous response to changes in economic conditions. We demonstrate two ways of purging uncertainty shocks of their predictable component and find that uncertainty's transmission to output and employment is much smaller than traditional estimates. Instead, we find that uncertainty's relationship with aggregate real activity is more the result of its role as an amplification mechanism for other macroeconomic and financial shocks.
Foreign Exchange Interventions and Low Frequency UIP Deviations in Emerging Economics (draft coming soon)
with Makoto Tanaka
We document significant deviations from uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) in emerging markets currency monthly return using data from 1995 to 2020. Negative and persistent deviations from UIP are consistent with previous evidence for advanced economies. While recent research has focused on the importance of financial and liquidity shocks to explain high frequency behavior of UIP deviations, we aim to understand what drives these deviations at low frequencies. We argue that monetary policy, using short-term rates, can play an important role in driving these slow-moving deviations when the central bank uses FX interventions to manage exchange rate volatility. In the context of segmented financial market, monetary policy shocks interact with net foreign assets (NFAs) to generate persistent deviations from UIP. We also study the role that different fiscal policy stances can play for the dynamics of UIP deviations.
Pre-Doctoral Publications
Policy Space Index: Short-term Response to a Catastrophic Event
Economic Analysis and Policy, Volume 79, September 2023, Pages 837-859
with Alexei Kireyev
What policy space does a country have for a short-term response to a catastrophic event? To quantify this space, the paper proposes a policy space index. The index combines a quantitative, albeit relatively limited and narrow, fiscal space concept with the indicators of nominal monetary space and reserve space. Each nominal policy space indicator is then adjusted for individual country’s institutional features, such as the status of its currency, income group, access to capital markets, debt distress level, and the exchange rate regime. The final policy space index is derived as a composite of the three nominal policy space indicators, each adjusted for five institutional features. This index is different from the approach to measure fiscal space at the IMF and requires more work before it can be used operationally. The proposed index allows measuring the overall policy space in each country directly in percent of GDP. By way of illustration, the paper applies the index to the Covid-19 crisis.
Work in Progress
The Cyclicality of Fiscal Policy and Inflation
Inflation Targeting, Fear of Floating, and Reserves Accumulation in Emerging Economics