Enrica Detragiache

Enrica Detragiache is the head of the Germany Desk of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the assistant director of the IMF's European division. She formerly taught economics at Johns Hopkins University, and has published over 70 research papers and articles. Her research covers topics such as labour migration, financial crises, development economics, and corporate finance.

Education Detragiache completed her undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Turin in Italy. She went on to postgraduate research at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. in economics in 1988. Her Ph.D. dissertation, "Essays on external borrowing by less developed countries" covers default risks in international finance markets for loans from a theoretical point of view. During Detragiache's graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, her advisors were former Chief Economist of the IMF Maurice Obstfeld, and Argentine-American economist Guillermo A. Calvo.

Career Detragiache began her academic career as an assistant professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, from 1988 to 1995. She then went on to work at the IMF in 1995, where she started out as an economic advisor. She then specialised as an advisor for the European department of the IMF in 2011, and then in 2012 became the assistant director of the European division of the IMF, where she remains today. She is also currently the Mission Chief for Germany. These trips can also be undertaken when a request is made to borrow IMF resources, or in order to monitor staff programs or economic development. In 2016, Detragiache's German Consultation led her to find that domestic demand was leading German economic growth at the time, along with expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, but the possibility of Brexit posed a downward risk.

Research and academic work Detragiache has written many working papers for the IMF on financial crises, banking, labour migration and development economics, among other topics. Her research has also been published in numerous academic journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Development Economics.

Her research has been cited heavily, in particular research she has done on labour movement during the European Migrant Crisis, where Germany's open-door refugee policy led to the country accepting large numbers of refugees. In an article from the Guardian in 2016, she is cited as saying that the negative effects of the refugee influx will be short-lived, and that adequate training of migrant workers would allow them to integrate into the domestic job market and provide a boost to the economy. According to this paper, there can be circumstances where the “pessimistic expectations about the borrower's creditworthiness become self-fulfilling, and the borrower experiences a liquidity crisis.” They account for the effects of institutional checks and balances on political power in the countries under consideration, as well as the enforcement of property rights. The researchers looked at a dataset of financial sector reforms in 91 different sample countries from 1973 to 2005. They conclude that the benefits of liberalization reforms have only had beneficial effects on financial deepening in countries with strong institutions to protect citizens from state or elite expropriation.

Responding to Banking Crises: Lessons from Cross-Country Evidence (2010)

Detragiache and fellow IMF economist Giang Ho wrote this working paper for the IMF in January 2010, in response to the 2008 financial crisis. To research the effects of government intervention in financial crises, the two looked at banking crises in 40 different countries occurring over the years from 1980, in Argentina, to 2003 in the Dominican Republic. They found that more fiscally risky attempts by governments to rescue failing banks do not lower the economic costs of these crises, and overall end up with worse post-crisis economic performance. They also find that parliamentary, rather than presidential, political systems are more likely to put in place costly measures to rescue banks.

In terms of the methodology that Detragiache and Ho used for this paper, they estimated an empirical model measuring economic performance during the crisis, including a policy response index which they constructed. This policy response index takes into account the magnitude of the commitment of public financial resources by the government, and ranges from a low of -2 in Argentina in 1989, to a high of 4 assigned to crises in Jamaica (1996), Sweden (1991), and Turkey (2000).