About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2025, and previously worked in the Macroeconomic Modeling Department at Banco de la República, Colombia's central bank.

My research is on sovereign debt and default in developing and small open economies. It asks how the terms of a government's borrowing shape its willingness to repay: the currency its debt is denominated in and the exchange rate regime behind it, whether its creditors are private or multilateral, and how much of an obligation gets paid rather than defaulted on outright. A related strand asks how sovereign default should be measured at all.

I build quantitative default models, estimate them on cross-country data, and use them to evaluate policy — currency arrangements, multilateral debt relief, and the fiscal cost of defending a peg.

Primary fields — International macroeconomics; sovereign debt and default
Secondary fields — Quantitative macroeconomics; structural estimation

Publications

Opportunistic Sovereign Default under a Credible Peg

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control  ·  191 (2026), 105401

In the African Financial Community (CFA) franc zones, a credible euro peg coexists with external debt denominated largely in U.S. dollars: euro–dollar fluctuations, exogenous to these small economies, directly raise the domestic-currency burden of debt. Panel regressions show that such depreciations raise sovereign default intensity by roughly 9%. In these same high-default years, consumption does not fall—evidence against the insurance motive of standard default models. I explain both facts by extending the partial default framework of Arellano et al. (2023) with foreign-currency debt, exogenous exchange rate shocks, and government heterogeneity. Exogeneity changes the nature of default: governments default not for insurance but opportunistically, exploiting the valuation gap between the higher debt burden and the higher revenue from new borrowing, generating a short-run rise in consumption. A policy counterfactual finds leaving for a self-managed dollar peg welfare-neutral on the financial side: opportunistic default insures the mismatch so effectively that a country profits from devaluations whatever their source, so the arrangement’s value lies not in shielding the debt but in the exogenous-devaluation environment that makes default opportunistic.

Keywords — Sovereign default; partial default; nominal exchange rate shocks; foreign currency debt; CFA franc zones
JEL — F33, F34, F41, F45, H63

DOI SSRN

Working papers

The Flow, Not the Stock: Debt Relief and Sovereign Default

Working paper  ·  Under review

In 1996 the IMF and the World Bank launched the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, canceling most of the official debt of eligible countries after years of reform. In a sample of 44 sub-Saharan African countries, time in default fell by 24 percentage points in the decade after completion, against 5 for controls, most sharply on private claims (down nearly 60 percent) that the program left largely untouched. Completion also brought better administration and 3.8 points of GDP in revenue, but no change in output, private debt, or the official lending terms, while official forgiveness collapsed for completers and controls alike. Because these changes arrived together, completion is chosen, and a write-off has no single effect — its sign depends on the forgiveness a government expects next — I calibrate a sovereign default model to the pre-program economy. The shared collapse reproduces the controls’ flat default; the write-off barely moves default, because the sovereign re-borrows the room it frees; the revenue gain ends the defaults, and with all three the model matches untargeted debt levels, the completion rate and the fall in total default. In counterfactual programs the cost, the speed and the size of the write-off decide how many governments complete, while the revenue gain decides what completion does to default: canceling the entire official stock without it would have lowered the relieved governments’ default by 10 points, against 29 under the program. Debt relief works through the flow it carries, not the stock it cancels.

Keywords — Sovereign default; debt relief; HIPC Initiative; conditional aid; institutional quality
JEL — F34, F35, F41, H63, O19

SSRN

Work in progress

  • Sovereign Default Over the Business Cycle with David Benjamin, Todd Messer and Mark L. J. Wright
  • Sovereign Default: Some Default Measures with Todd Messer and Mark L. J. Wright
  • Fiscal Support for Exchange Rate Targets with Joseph Kachovec and Cameron McLoughlin
  • The Impact of Complexity in Firm Context on PCAOB Inspection Outcomes with Mahendra Gupta and Richard Palmer

Teaching

  • International Macroeconomics Universidad del Pacífico · Sections A and B
    2026
  • Economic Analysis with Excel Washington University in St. Louis · Instructor of record
    2023–2024
  • Introduction to Stata Washington University in St. Louis · Instructor of record
    2024
  • Introduction to Macroeconomics Washington University in St. Louis · Instructor of record
    2022–2023