Biography

Alberto Ortiz Bolaños is a Financial Economist with Executive Management, Research and Teaching expertise. Since September 2021, he has provided consulting services for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). From December 2018 to July 2021, he was Director General of Instituto Fonacot, the largest payroll credit institution in Mexico. Prior to that, he was Manager of Economic Research at the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA) and Research Professor at EGADE Business School of Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Since September 2021, he has contributed with the UNDP to assist the Royal Government of Cambodia in the implementation of the Integrated National Financing Framework being the penholder of the Feasibility Study on Khmer Riel Bonds, the Market Sounding on Government Securities, and the Issuance Plan for the first issuance of government securities in September 2022. Also, he wrote a report on how credit guarantees are being used as a policy instrument for COVID-19 recovery, and he provided guidelines for the selection criteria of the Women Entrepreneurs Guarantee Scheme (WEGS), launched in April 2022. Currently, he is assisting the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) of Cambodia to draft the Comprehensive Policy Framework on the Development of Government Securities 2022 – 2028. In addition, he is preparing the new round of market sounding to later develop the issuance plan of government securities for the year 2023. Also, he has provided technical support to the MEF on Environmental, Social and Governance bonds, Impact bonds, and Public-Private Partnerships.

From November 2021 to August 2022, he wrote a monograph for the IADB on how corruption affects public finances around the world. The analysis provides a theoretical framework about the margins by which corruption reduces income, assets, and their return; and increases expenditure, liabilities, and their cost; in an intertemporal setting. This allowed him to describe how corruption determines optimal expenditure through its effects on the marginal rate of transformation, the marginal rate of substitution, and the lifetime resource constraints. In addition, he provided evidence on how corruption manifests in the banking, oil and mining sectors using information from almost 40,000 private and public companies around the world.

At Instituto Fonacot he administered and legally represented the institution which, during his 31-month tenure, had a 36% increase in assets, a 25% increase in credit portfolio and a 57% increase in capital, while the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on credits were lowered, for the first time in more than a decade, going from 43.5% to 30.4%.

His main research areas are 1) the study of macrofinancial linkages; 2) the measurement of the sources of economic fluctuations in emerging markets; and 3) the analysis of macroeconomic and financial regulation policies.

Among other phenomena, he has analyzed the economic consequences of credit market imperfections and the role of monetary policy and credit contract indexation in economic stabilization; has compared the relative importance of domestic and foreign factors in emerging market economic fluctuations and the role and interaction of monetary and fiscal policies for economic outcomes; and has also studied the determinants of capital buffers in a panel of more than 7,000 banks across 143 countries and he has analyzed the role of banks’ net stable funding ratio in explaining future financial instability.

At CEMLA, Dr. Ortiz conducted research in the above-mentioned areas and designed and delivered services for central banks in Latin America and the Caribbean through conferences, seminars, courses, and other research related activities, many of them coordinated with technical partners such as IMF, BIS, ECB, and the Bank of England, among others. An important contribution was the coordination of research activities among several central bank researchers through the Joint Research program, the internship program, and the on-line research seminars.

Regarding his academic activities, Dr. Ortiz has taught courses on Microeconomics of Banking, Market Failure in Financial Markets, Macroeconomic Theory, Money and Banking, Open Macroeconomics, Economic Development, Mathematical Methods for Economists, Economic Environment of the Organization, Fundamentals of Global Business, Fundamentals of Economics and International Financial Policy at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Boston University, Oberlin College, and Harvard University.

He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University in 2009, having previously acquired a Master Degree in Political Economy at the same institution and a Bachelor Degree in Economics from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in 2002.