Ricardo J. Caballero

Ricardo Jorge Caballero (born 20 October 1959) is a Chilean macroeconomist who holds the Ford International chair of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a director of the World Economic Laboratory at MIT and an NBER Research Associate. Caballero received his PhD from MIT in 1988, and he taught at Columbia University before returning to the MIT faculty.

Recently, Caballero's work has focused on Risk-Centric Macroeconomics and Safe Assets. He has also studied the aggregate behavior of economies with heterogeneous agents, the macroeconomic effects of irreversible investment in firm-specific assets, and Schumpeterian theories of technological progress through creative destruction.

Awards and Fellowships

In 2002, Caballero was awarded the Econometric Society's Frisch Medal with Eduardo Engel for their paper Explaining Investment Dynamics in U.S. Manufacturing: A Generalized (S, s) Approach. He was awarded the Smith Breeden Prize by the American Finance Association for “Collective Risk Management in a Flight to Quality Episode”, Journal of Finance, 63(5), October 2008 (joint with Arvind Krishnamurthy) and the Journal of Finance 2014 Brattle Group Prize for distinguished papers for “Fire Sales in a Model of Complexity,” joint with Alp Simsek.

In April 1998, Caballero was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society and subsequently of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010.

Selected Readings

• Reach for Yield and Fickle Capital Flows (with Alp Simsek) AEA Papers and Proceedings (2018): 493-498
• Fire Sales in a Model of Complexity (with Alp Simsek) The Journal of Finance 68.6 (December 2013): 2549-2587
• Collective Risk Management in a Flight to Quality Episode (with Arvind Krisnamurthy) Journal of Finance 63.5 (October 2008): 2195-2230
• Explaining Investment Dynamics in U.S. Manufacturing: A Generalized(S,s) Approach (with Eduardo M. R. A. Engel) July 1999, Econometrica 67(4), 783-826.
• External Vulnerability and Preventive Policies. editor (with C. Calderon and L.F. Cespedes).
• Macroeconomic Volatility in Reformed Latin America: Diagnosis and Policy Proposals. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank. 2001.
• Specificity and the Macroeconomics of Restructuring. MIT Press, Spring 2007 .