Alejandro Izquierdo is Deputy Director and Head of the Macro Group at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He previously held positions as interim Chief Economist and Manager of the Research Department, Regional Economic Advisor for Mexico and Central America, and Principal Economist across the IDB. Alejandro spearheaded the IDB’s Annual Macroeconomic Report for several years and is currently co-director of the Columbia University-IDB executive program on international financial issues in emerging markets. He has also led IDB’s flagship product, the Development in the Americas, on issues such as credit and public expenditure in Latin America. Before his career at the IDB, Alejandro worked at the World Bank in the Department of Economic Policy, and taught courses on macroeconomics and international finance at several Latin American universities. He has several publications in professional journals and edited volumes. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland, an M.S. from Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina, and a B.A. in Economics from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Alejandro’s current research interests include issues in international finance such as optimal levels of international reserves, the role of external factors on growth, the relevance of balance-sheet effects and financial integration in determining the likelihood of experiencing sudden stops in capital flows, as well as how countries recover from output collapses following sudden stops. He has also worked on the impact of sudden stops in the variance of relative prices, fiscal sustainability under sudden stops, and amplification effects of collateral constraints on the real exchange rate and output. More recently, he has also focused on fiscal issues such as procyclical fiscal policies in current and capital expenditures, as well as capital expenditure multipliers. Additionally, he has conducted research on the impact of macroeconomic external shocks and public expenditure allocation on poverty reduction for developing countries using computable general equilibrium models.