Eduardo Levy Yeyati

Eduardo Levy Yeyati
Born	November 1965 (age 58) Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nationality	Argentina
Academic career
Field	Economic Development International Finance
Institution	Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Universidad de Buenos Aires Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Alma mater	Universidad de Buenos Aires (B.S. in Civil Enginnering, 1989) University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Economics, 1996)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Eduardo Levy Yeyati (born November 14, 1965) is an Argentine economist and author. He teaches at the School of Economics of Universidad de Buenos Aires and at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella's School of Business,. He is also a founding Partner at Elypsis, an economic research firm that he founded in 2011. Since March 2016, he is the President of the Council of Production at the Argentina´s Ministry of Production.

He holds a Ph. D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Career

For much of his career, Levy Yeyati combined academic and policy-oriented research with policy making and private practice.

He was an economist at the Internationa Monetary Fund from 1995 to 1998, professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella since 1999, where he directed its Center for Financial Research from 1999 to 2007, Chief Economist at the Central Bank of Argentina in 2002, Senior Financial Sector Adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean at The World Bank from 2006 to 2007, Head of Emerging Markets Strategy and Head of Latin American Research at Barclays Capital from 2007 to 2010), President of the Board of CIPPEC, an Argentina-based policy think tank, from 2013 to 2016, and Board Director at the Bank of Investment and International Trade (Argentina´s development bank in 2016.

He was also a Visiting Professor of Publi Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2014 to 2016, Senior Research Fellow for the Inter-American Development Bank (2005–2006), Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution, and Guest Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics,., and has advised as an expert for the World Bank, the IADB, the IMF, CAF, the OECD and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, among many other institutions and governments.

In 2012, Levy Yeyati founded Elypsis, an economic and financial research firm based in Buenos Aires.

Writings

His academic work on emerging market banking and finance have been published in American Economic Review, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of International Economics, European Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, and Economic Policy, among other international refereed journals, and is ranked at the top by RePEc among Argentina's economists. His research have focused on financial dollarization, the behavior of banks and financial markets during crises, international financial architecture, monetary and exchange-rate regimes and development finance.

Together with Federico Sturzenegger, he prepared a popular classification of de facto exchange-rate regimes, and contributed the monetary and exchange rate policy chapter of the last edition of the Handbook of Development Economics. His writes regularly for Vox EU and Project Syndicate, and for local newspapers La Nación and Perfil.

In Spanish, he has published two essays on Argentina's recent political and economic history, one on the 2002 crisis and its aftermath with the historian Diego Valenzuela (La resurrección: La historia de la poscrisis Argentina, 2007, Ed. Sudamericana) and another one on the decline of the post crisis economic boom with historian Marcos Novaro (Vamos por Todo: La 10 decisiones más polémicas del modelo, 2013, Ed. Sudamericana), and a book on development, ("Porvenir: Caminos al Desarrollo Argentino", 2015, Ed. Sudamericana), as well as two novels: Gallo (2008, Ed. Random House Mondadori) and Culebrón (2013, Ed. Random House Mondadori).

De Facto Exchange Rate Regimes

In joint work with Federico Sturzenegger, Eduardo Levy Yeyati developed a classification of exchange rate regimes de facto in the paper "Classyfing Exchange Rate Regimes: Deeds vs. Words". Stuzenegger and Levy Yeyati highlighted that most of the empirical literature on exchange rate regimes had been using the IMF de jure classification based on official sources, despite well-known inconsistencies between reported and actual policies. The authors argued that many countries that in theory adopted a flexible exchange rate regime intervened in exchange markets so pervasively that for practical purposes (in terms of observable performance) they could be assimilated to countries with explicit fixed exchange rate regimes. Conversely, periodic exchange rate realignments in inflation-prone peg countries reflected a monetary policy more inconsistent with flexible exchange rate arrangements.

In this light, the authors proposed a de facto classification of exchange rate regimes that attempted to reflect actual rather than reported policies, providing an alternative and a complement to the standard de jure groupings. Sturzenegger and Levy Yeyati's classification is based on three variables: changes in the nominal exchange rate, the volatility of these changes, and the volatility of international reserves, folllowing a textbook definition of regimes according to which fixed exchange rates are associated with changes in international reserves (to reduce the volatility of the nominal exchange rate) whereas flexible exchange rates are characterized by volatility in nominal rates coupled with relatively stable reserves. The combined behavior of these three variables can be used to provide a fairly robust characterization of the de facto regime at particular years.

External links

• Academic publications
• Las pistas falsas
• El enigma de las vidas ajenas
• Después de la crisis, la hora de la verdad
• Vox columns
• Project Syndicate columns
• "Redefining 'emerging markets'"