The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has appointed Enrique Martínez García to lead the bank’s research on international economic issues and Karel Mertens has been named director of research and senior vice president in charge of the statistics department.
In this new role, Martínez García will manage the contributions of the Dallas Fed’s international research group to economic briefings and publications and help team members develop research agendas and portfolios that contribute to the bank’s strategic priority to grow research thought leadership. The appointment follows his recent executive promotion to economic policy advisor.
Martínez García joined the bank in 2007 after receiving his PhD in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely in the areas of international macroeconomics and finance on such topics as the impact of globalization on monetary policy, the global slack hypothesis and the influence of international factors on inflation, interest rate dynamics and asset prices. He was instrumental in the development and publication of the Database on Global Economic Indicators and the International House Price Database at the Dallas Fed and continues to serve as co-director of the International Housing Observatory global research partnership. His work on international house prices was recognized with the 2023 Central Banking Award in Economics.
Mertens currently serves as senior economic policy advisor at the Dallas Fed and has served as interim director of research since February. In his new position, he will lead the bank’s effort to grow research thought leadership, advise on matters related to monetary policy and guide statistics’ efforts to collect and analyze data from across the 11th Federal Reserve District.
Mertens’ research interests include business cycles, fiscal policy, banking and monetary economics, empirical macroeconomics and time series econometrics. His recent work focuses on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal and credit policies. He is a research fellow at the Center of Economic Policy Research and a former research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the bank in 2017, he was an associate professor of economics at Cornell University.
Mertens is a native of Belgium and holds a licentiate degree in economics from Ghent University, an MS degree in economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in economics from the European University Institute.
The Dallas Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks and serves the 11th Federal Reserve District, which includes Texas, northern Louisiana and southern New Mexico.
