Andrew Powell is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts, in the Economics Department and at the Center for Development Economics.
Andrew completed a BA., MPhil. and DPhil. (PhD) at Oxford University in the U.K. He was Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and then Lecturer B (Associate Professor) at Queen Mary’s College, University of London and at the University of Warwick in the U.K. He joined the Central Bank of Argentina as the Head of Economic Research in March 1995 and then served as the Chief Economist from June 1996 to April 2001. He was then Professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella (June 2001 to August 2005) in Buenos Aires, Argentina and subsequently had various roles at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington D.C., including Lead Economist in the Research Department, Regional Economic Advisor, and then the Principal Advisor of the Research Department, until he retired from the IDB in March 2023.
While pursuing his academic career, Andrew was also Visiting Scholar at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and at Harvard University, and while working at the Argentine Central Bank represented Argentina regularly at the G20 and on international committees. At the IDB, Andrew coordinated Network Research Projects and the Network of Central Banks and Finance Ministries, reviewed numerous projects, country strategies and corporate products, and provided strategic advice to senior management on many issues as well as pursuing his own research agenda.
Andrew has published numerous academic papers in leading journals on a wide range of topics including commodity markets, risk management, regulation, monetary and fiscal policy in developing countries, banking and the role of international financial institutions. He has edited several books and was one of the main editors of two recent IDB flagships, on debt and on infrastructure, and has coordinated the IDBs annual macroeconomic report on numerous occasions. He also helped coordinate two expert groups and coauthored two recent reports jointly published by the IDB and the CGD, on the performance of banks and the performance of firms through the COVID period.
A recent paper published in the Journal of International Economics develops a model of why institutions like the IMF and the main multilateral development banks (MDBs) have preferred creditor status. A chapter in the forthcoming new edition of the Oxford Handbook of Banking considers the performance of banking systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other recent papers consider how a liquidity line backed by SDRs could benefit MDBs, and how MDBs can shed risk from their balance sheets, through risk transfer, to lend more. Ongoing research analyzes capital flows to developing countries through and beyond the COVID period, and how countries’ recent experiences with inflation can be explained by the combination of country characteristics, and external and domestic shocks.
