Georgetown Americas Institute

Featuring

Luciano Cohan is the co-founder of Alphacast. Cohan is an expert in macroeconomic research and macro-financial strategy. He is currently a partner at SEIDO and formerly served as the undersecretary of macroeconomic planning for Argentina. Before that, he was a research associate at Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC), chief economist at Elypsis, and professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires. He also worked as a consultant for multilateral organizations such as Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Latin American Initiative at Brooking Institution. He has published research on agricultural value chains and, recently, on Latin America’s macroeconomic and financial outlook. 

Antoni Estevadeordal is a resident fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute, where he leads the project “Latin America in the Global Economy”, and senior research fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). He previously held senior roles at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), including IDB representative in Europe, head of the IDB Migration Initiative, and manager of the Integration and Trade Sector. His expertise spans international development, trade and investment policy, and regional integration. He has published extensively in major journals and authored several books. He served as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Logistics, and has also taught at leading universities in Spain, the United States, and China. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics from the University of Barcelona.

Barbara Kotschwar teaches courses on trade and integration in the Americas, and China-Latin America relations here at Georgetown; she is also a Board member of Georgetown’s Center on Inclusive Trade and Development (CITD). An expert on international trade, Dr. Kotschwar’s career includes high-level positions in Fortune 500 corporations, international organizations and leading think tanks. She recently served as executive director of the Visa Economic Empowerment Institute where, among other issues, she researched trends in digital trade. She has advised governments and organizations across the globe on trade and integration issues, including as part of the World Bank’s investment policy team, as head of the OAS’s Foreign Trade Information Section and in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank, the OAS, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Her work has been cited in, among others, the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, El Diario de Cuba, El Financiero, and on CNN, C-SPAN and NPR as well as in the US Supreme Court. A citizen of Canada and the US, she received her PhD from Johns Hopkins SAIS and studied economics and political science at McGill University in Montreal.

Sebastian Galiani is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and visiting professor at Universidad de San Andres, Argentina. He is a member of the executive committee for the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA). In the past, he held positions at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andres in Argentina; he was Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and visiting scholar at Stanford and University of California, Berkeley. Galiani was the chairman of LACEA’s Network of Inequality and Poverty from 2004 to 2005 and a member of its executive committee between 2004 and 2008.

Alejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. He recently completed almost nine years as director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that appointment, he was undersecretary of finance and public credit in Mexico’s Finance Ministry and held several positions in that ministry and the Central Bank. He also taught at leading universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from ITAM.