Welcome!
Welcome!
I am a PhD candidate in economics at KU Leuven in Belgium, supervised by Christian Proebsting.
During the academic year 2025-2026, I am visiting the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, hosted by Jón Steinsson, supported by a Fulbright Schuman grant.
My research focuses on macroeconomics, where I study how shocks propagate across regions within a country or among countries in a monetary union. I combine granular microdata to analyze the local effects of aggregate shocks with structural models to study their implications for aggregate and distributional outcomes.
My research is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) fundamental research grant.
I grew up in La Rioja, in Northern Spain.
Feel free to reach out: alberto.paviasoto[at]kuleuven.be
Research
Working Papers
- The Role of Risk-Sharing in Attenuating Business Cycles Within Currency Unions
with Christian Proebsting
Best paper prize RES PhD Conference 2024
Abstract
Lacking monetary policy, member states of a currency union rely on risk sharing mechanisms to attenuate state-specific business cycles. We show that risk sharing not only directly smooths consumption but also indirectly reduces the volatility of income by stabilizing demand. We causally estimate both direct and indirect effects by exploiting regional variation in military buildups across U.S. states. A $1 increase in external demand raises state-level income by $1.32, with 50% of this increase passing through to consumption. This pass-through is significantly higher than traditional unconditional estimates (15%). A multi-state model that incorporates multiple risk-sharing channels rationalizes these findings and shows that risk sharing between U.S. states reduces state-level consumption volatility by a factor of 3.5, with indirect effects accounting for 45% of this reduction. Risk-sharing channels act as substitutes and have heterogeneous benefits across states, with credit markets rather than capital markets providing the greatest smoothing.Presentations (including scheduled)
- 2023:
- KU Leuven macro seminar (Leuven, Belgium)
- KOF-ETH Zürich-University of Zurich* (Zurich, Switzerland)
- 2024:
- KU Leuven macro seminar (Leuven, Belgium)
- 13th PhD Student Conference in International Macroeconomics (Paris, France)
- Ghent University Workshop on Empirical Macroeconomics (Ghent, Belgium; poster)
- IAAE 2024 (Thessaloniki, Greece)
- University of Nottingham* (Nottingham, UK)
- RES PhD Conference 2024 (Portsmouth, UK)
- 2025:
- 18th RGS Doctoral Conference (Dortmund, Germany)
- T2M (CREST, France)
- 5th Sailing the Macro Workshop* (Siracusa, Italy)
* Denotes presentations made by co-author.
- 2023:
Work in Progress
- Regional Business Cycles and their Impact on Aggregate Fluctuations