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.

You can find my CV here.

Research

Job Market Paper

Monetary-Fiscal-Capital Account Interactions in Small Open Economies

(WAIFS slides) (2025 ERC slides)

I develop a framework of monetary, fiscal, and capital account interactions for small open economies (SOEs) to study the nature and stability of equilibria under different policy configurations. I identify three policy regimes that yield a unique and bounded equilibrium. The first two echo known monetary and fiscal dominance regimes but also extend them by adding the condition that capital account policy ensures current account solvency. The third regime--capital account dominance--arises when policy targets the (real) exchange rate, thereby uniquely determining the price level. In this case, inflation is driven by the country’s current account rather than by monetary policy or the government’s budget constraint. I provide evidence that Chile in the late 1980s was an example of capital account dominance. The framework also has important policy implications for inflation targeting in SOEs: (i) monetary policy's ability to control inflation requires both fiscal and capital account policy support, and (ii) inflation targeting under fixed exchange rates is inconsistent with intertemporal current account solvency.

Working Papers

Macroeconomic Transmission of (Un-) Predictable Uncertainty Shocks

with John Rogers and Jiawen Xu (2021) (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.

Pre-Doctoral Publications

Policy Space Index: Short-term Response to a Catastrophic Event

with Alexei Kireyev, Economic Analysis and Policy, Volume 79, September 2023, Pages 837-859

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

FX Interventions and Low Frequency Deviations of UIP in Emerging Economics

with Makoto Tanaka

Inflation Targeting, Fear of Floating, and Reserves Accumulation in Emerging Economics