My research focuses on banking, financial crises, and macroeconomics, with a special interest in economic history. My work explores how credit markets, bank regulation, and monetary forces shape business cycles and long-run economic outcomes.
I am a Financial Economist in the Quantitative Supervision and Research Group (QSR) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Supervision, Regulation and Credit Department, based in Charlotte, NC.
My research sits at the intersection of banking, macroeconomics, and economic history. I study how credit markets and bank regulation shape business cycles, how financial panics propagate, and how monetary forces contributed to major economic downturns — in particular the Great Depression. I combine Bayesian econometrics, structural modeling, and historical data to address these questions.
Before joining the Richmond Fed, I spent over twelve years in private consulting, academia, and bank supervision at the Central Bank of Brazil. I hold a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Irvine (2021).
A recurring theme across my projects is how financial intermediaries respond to regulatory and macroeconomic shocks — and how those responses feed back into credit supply, asset prices, and aggregate economic activity, both in the present and in historical episodes.
Examines how fear contagion across banks amplified the banking panics of the Great Depression. Uses newly assembled data to trace how depositor runs spread geographically, interacting with monetary policy and the structure of the banking system to deepen the economic contraction.
Published version →Estimates exchange rate pass-through nonlinearity in Brazil (2000–2015) using a Markov-switching DSGE framework. Identifies a normal regime with near-zero long-run pass-through and a crisis regime with substantially higher exchange rate transmission, finding the switching model outperforms fixed-parameter alternatives.
Published version → REPEC working paper →Analyzes the legal and institutional foundations of central bank autonomy in Brazil, discussing the implications of operational independence for monetary policy credibility and long-run inflation outcomes.
Journal issue →Surveys the adoption and impact of decision support systems across South American organizations, documenting regional implementation challenges and lessons from applied operations research.
Book →Examines how information technology supports knowledge management strategies in a software development organization. Presents a case study built on the Hansen et al. (1999) model, identifying advantages and limitations of specific technologies applied to knowledge management and proposing extensions to the original framework.
PDF →Provides the first systematic evidence that market volatility is a significant driver of bank operational risk losses. Using a daily panel of over 600,000 loss events at 49 U.S. bank holding companies, a one-standard-deviation increase in the VIX is associated with a 23% rise in operational losses — affecting frequency, severity, and the moderate tail. Losses concentrate in execution and processing errors and system failures, consistent with human error under stress and strained risk-management systems. Effects are stronger for smaller, fast-growing, and weakly risk-managed banks, with direct implications for operational-risk stress testing and supervisory monitoring.
SSRN working paper →Examines how the Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR), introduced under Basel III for the largest U.S. banks, affected risk-taking, pricing, and local house prices in the mortgage market. Finds that banks subject to the new requirement increased overall risk-taking on mortgages, with the effect substantially amplified for higher-priced loans — banks raised interest rates to compensate for risk and held riskier loans longer on their balance sheets. The resulting increase in aggregate credit supply is linked to higher future home prices. Effects are heterogeneous, falling disproportionately on higher-risk borrowers: leverage limits coexisted with expanded credit availability, even as leverage shifted from banks' to households' balance sheets, leaving borrowers more exposed to risk from future income shocks.
SSRN working paper →Investigates how US Federal Reserve policy and credit shocks interacted with stock prices and macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1920s. Estimates monetary and financial shocks in a Bayesian VAR identified by a combination of sign and variance decomposition restrictions. Finds that monetary policy was insufficient to stabilize credit growth and stock prices — implying a significant output and price-level trade-off — while financial factors played an important role in output growth. Quantifies the contribution of credit supply shocks to stock price fluctuations in the lead-up to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
SSRN working paper →Analyzes how US commercial banks adjusted their asset portfolios in response to capital requirements during the early 1990s credit crunch. A discrete-choice model captures the margin-by-margin substitution across loan categories as banks sought to comply with tightening regulatory capital constraints.
SSRN working paper →Exploits the incidence of natural disasters during the National Banking Era to study how exogenous local shocks affected bank balance sheets, lending, and community-level economic outcomes in the absence of modern safety nets.
Constructs a long-run dataset of Parliamentary legislation to measure how legal and institutional change shaped British economic growth over four centuries, linking specific acts to changes in investment, trade, and financial development.
Studies how agents' beliefs about Keynesian fiscal multipliers evolve over time using an adaptive learning framework, and how shifting macroeconomic expectations interact with fiscal policy effectiveness.
Estimates the role of sentiment shocks in driving the stock market boom of the 1920s using an adaptive learning model, separating expectational dynamics from fundamental drivers of equity price fluctuations in the pre-Depression decade.