Guillermo Antonio Calvo (born 1941) is an Argentine-American economist who is director of Columbia University's mid-career Program in Economic Policy Management in their School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

Calvo showed his commitment to narrowing the gap between academic and practitioners by splitting his time between academia and international financial institutions.

In the latter, he was instrumental in helping to set up world class research departments in the International Monetary Fund (where he was a Senior Advisor during 1990–1992) and the Inter-American Development Bank (where he was the Chief Economist during 2001–2006).

Calvo's work aims at incorporating financial sector issues in macroeconomic models and emphasizes the role of external factors in EMs.

His contributions remain widely cited in academic and policy circles, such as his 1988 "Servicing the Public Debt: The Role of Expectations" and his 1991 "Perils of Sterilization."

[3] Expressions like "Calvo equation," "Sudden Stop," "Fear of Floating" – found in, or linked to, his papers – are common currency in the financial jargon.

It shows that a conventional overlapping-generations model can give rise to equilibrium multiplicity and, moreover, that the latter phenomenon is more likely to arise if the propensity to save is relatively inelastic with respect to the real interest rate, a case akin to that emphasized in Keynes's General Theory.

This is a fundamental result because it dispels any doubt one might have that time inconsistency follows from just the government trying to cheat the public by making promises that it does not intend to honor.

Prior to this paper, the dominant explanation for costly price stabilization programs relied on mechanical factors like adaptive expectations/Phillips curve.

An advantage of Calvo's approach is that it highlights the relevance of central banks' ability to communicate with the public and the importance of getting strong support from the rest of the government and political apparatus, even though individuals are fully rational.

This paper received considerable attention; it provides one of the earliest frameworks that help to explain, for instance, why a CEO can earn multiples of his/her underlings' salaries.

[4] The approach was first developed to clarify price stabilization puzzles in EMs, but was eventually incorporated as a fundamental component in New Keynesian economics.

This paper shows that under incomplete capital markets, public debt can give rise to multiple equilibriums which can be Pareto ranked.

The AER 1988 paper was motivated by stubborn high inflation in Brazil, despite low public debt and positive primary fiscal surplus.

His first papers go back to the early 1980s, but his research on these topic took flight after the Mexican Tequila crisis in 1994/5 triggered by a sudden increase in US interest rates.

Ref.7c crowned this effort by defining and offering some simple but fundamental rationalization for a new concept that since then has become part of the economists’ jargon in the discussion of financial crises, namely, ‘Sudden Stop’.

Ref 7e shows that despite fixed exchange rates being singled out as a major factor in EM crises in the 1990s, governments in those economies continue 'pegging' their currencies in one way or another.