Concurrently with his position at CID, Hausmann has also held several positions at profit and non-profit organizations: he was a member of the board of Venezuela's full-service telephone company CANTV (2001–2007), of microfinance institution ACCION International (2009–2011), and of the advisory board of Abengoa, a renewable energy and engineering company based in Spain.
Country-specific studies he has been involved with have included projects on Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, China, El Salvador, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Tunisia, Venezuela, and the United States.
[14] The authors define original sin as a situation in which the residents (or government) of a country are unable to borrow in their own domestic currency.
In other words, a poor country is forced to borrow funds denominated in foreign exchange (e.g. the U.S. dollar, the euro, or the yen).
Later research has mainly focused on the international component of original sin: the inability of most countries to borrow abroad in their own currency.
Barry Eichengreen, Hausmann and Ugo Panizza show that almost all of the countries (except US, Euro area, Japan, UK, and Switzerland) suffered from (international) original sin over time.
It makes debt riskier, increases volatility, and affects a country's ability to conduct an independent monetary policy.
Thus, large swings in the real exchange rate will have an effect on aggregate wealth and it will be more difficult for the country to service its debt.
Eichengreen, Hausmann and Panizza respond to both criticisms in a paper elaborating the difference between currency mismatches, debt intolerance and original sin.
[18] Self-discovery is a concept developed by Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, referring to the process of discovering what economic activities can profitably be pursued in a given country.
Thus, according to Hausmann and Rodrik, self-discovery has benefits that stretch far beyond the firm that originally invested in the discovery (in other words, it has positive externalities).
[22] At the time, the country had good macroeconomic indicators, decent institutions, low interest rates and returns to education.
However, according to Hausmann and his colleague Federico Sturzenegger, the U.S. current account deficit cannot in reality be as high as it is estimated to be: otherwise, the U.S. would be paying large amounts of interests on its debt.
Thus, the authors argue that the "real" cumulative current account in 2004 was in fact positive, and that somehow a large amount of (foreign) assets are being left out of the calculations.
[23][24][25] The suggested source of this "missing wealth" is dark matter, resulting from the unaccounted export of ideas and other services (such as insurance or liquidity) from the U.S. to other economies.
The two authors claim that the U.S. has significant exports, mainly of business know-how bundled with its foreign direct investment) that do not show up in official trade statistics.
[29] Lastly, Mathew Higgins, Thomas Klitgaard, and Cedric Tille agree with the assertion that U.S. foreign assets are currently undervalued.
Thus, The U.S. has fewer foreign liabilities than is currently assumed; this fact (rather than dark matter) explains the unexpectedly high net income.
[31] The Product Space is a tool for understanding the process of structural transformation and self-discovery, which Ricardo Hausmann introduced together with Cesar Hidalgo and Bailey Klinger.
[...] The process of structural transformation involves having monkeys jump from the poorer part of the forest to the richer part, but the probability of doing so successfully will depend on the expected productivity of those trees and to how close the monkeys are to unoccupied trees where proximity is related to the usefulness of the specific assets the country has for the production of the new good.
In a 2009 paper, then, the economic complexity index is put forward as a more accurate predictive measure of growth than previous indicators.