Portrait of Alfredo Mendoza-Fernández

Alfredo Mendoza-Fernández

Assistant Professor · School of Business and Economics, U Andes, Chile
Ph.D. in Economics · UC Berkeley

Welcome! I am an economist whose main research interests are in open-economy macroeconomics. You can reach out to me at amendozaf@uandes.cl.

Working papers

Do Central Banks Follow the Fed?

with Serra Pelin

We study how central banks respond to U.S. monetary shocks. Using a newly constructed dataset on monetary policy meetings (the MPM-dataset), we show that emerging-market (EME) central banks systematically move in tandem with the Fed, whereas advanced-economy central banks do not. We attribute this heterogeneity to the asymmetric spillovers of U.S. monetary policy on firms’ marginal costs. A three-bloc open-economy New Keynesian model with dominant currency pricing and partial debt dollarization reproduces these empirical patterns, highlighting that EME responses stem from the immediate impact of Fed shocks on exchange rates and, in turn, on marginal costs.

Coverage: Peterson Institute for International Economics

Seminars and conferences: Universidad de los Andes, Chile; University of Notre Dame; IMF–BoE–BIS–ECB Conference on Global Spillovers 2026; Getulio Vargas Foundation; Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Banco Central de la República; University of California, Berkeley.

The Emerging Market Great Moderation

with Timothy Meyer

We document a Great Moderation in emerging markets, a dramatic fall in aggregate macroeconomic volatility by about 40%, without changes in other distinctive characteristics of emerging-market business cycles. Using a novel methodology, we link the moderation to canonical emerging-market business-cycle theories. Consistent with those theories, the contribution of fluctuations in the growth trend is substantial and has not diminished. The moderation resulted in important welfare gains in emerging economies and stems from a reduction in country-specific volatility, which can be linked to shifts in monetary policy.

Seminars and conferences: EconCR 2023; Southern California Graduate Conference in Applied Economics 2024; CEPR Conference on Emerging Markets Macroeconomic Policies 2025; University of California, Berkeley.

Publications