Dr Adrián Carro

Biography

Adrián Carro joined the Macroprudential Policy Division at the Banco de España in October 2019, after spending three years as a Postdoctoral Research Officer at the University of Oxford (Institute for New Economic Thinking). During his last two years in Oxford, he was also a Visiting Academic Fellow at the Macro-Financial Risks Division at the Bank of England. Adrián holds a PhD in Physics from the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, September 2016), an MSc in Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI, July 2011), and a BSc (Licenciatura) in Physics from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (July 2010).

Adrián is generally interested in understanding the emergence of complex collective phenomena in social and economic systems in terms of the behaviours and interactions of their constituent elements. To this end, he develops agent-based models, i.e., computational simulations based on heterogeneous and interacting agents. During his MSc thesis and PhD research he focused on various stylised agent-based models and stochastic processes on complex networks, using a combination of mathematical analysis and computational simulations to study problems such as the formation of opinions in social groups, the role of transportation costs for sustainable economic development, and herding behaviour in financial markets. More recently, in his postdoctoral research at INET and in collaboration with the Bank of England, he has been developing a highly detailed and data-driven agent-based model of the UK housing market and its interaction, on the one hand, with the mortgage lending sector and, on the other hand, with transport infrastructure. This project has delivered a virtual sandbox where the systemic and distributional effects of different macroprudential policies can be tested.

Currently, Adrián is collaborating with INET and Bank of England researchers with the purpose of expanding the UK housing model in two main directions. On the one hand, they are introducing a well calibrated banking sector with heterogeneous banks, which will allow them to study the interactions between capital and product tools, both from a macro and a microprudential angle. On the other hand, they are also introducing stylised macroeconomic feedback loops in order to explore the dynamical properties of the system. In the context of his position at the Banco de España, Adrián is also working on adaptations of these models to the particularities of the Spanish housing market. Finally, he is also interested in models of contagion and systemic risk in the interbank market, where he has explored the role of uncertainty and nonlinearities in the contagion process.