Bernhard Harms Prize 2025

The Jury’s reasoning for Silvana Tenreyro

“Silvana Tenreyro has made outstanding academic contributions to international economics, with pioneering research on economic volatility, monetary policy transmission, as well as currency unions. Her work has considerably advanced our understanding of how diversification and the nature of shocks shape growth and welfare in both emerging and advanced economies. Her widely cited methodological paper on estimating gravity equations has become foundational in international trade economics. She stands out by combining theoretical rigor with empirical precision and innovation and her research has a lasting impact not only on research but also on policy making.” 

In addition to her academic achievements, Tenreyro served on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee from 2017 to 2023, helping guide the UK’s monetary policy through Brexit, the pandemic, and the recent inflation surge.

Taking a closer look at her achievements in monetary economics, Tenreyro, along with Giovanni Olivei, devised an original strategy to identify the role of nominal wage-contract rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy to economic activity; she also wrote seminal papers highlighting monetary policy asymmetries and redistributive effects. In recent work with Michael McLeay, she challenged the implications for monetary policy efficacy drawn from the dominant currency literature and proposed a new model of mixed-currency pricing that is more appropriate for discussing monetary and exchange rate policy in emerging and developing economies.

On macro development, in work with Miklos Koren she produced seminal papers which illuminate the relationship between volatility and development, as well as their interaction with technological adoption and international trade. Her work elucidates the conditions needed for technological progress and trade openness to help countries diversify macroeconomic shocks and lower macroeconomic volatility.

On international economics, in joint work with J.M.C. Santos Silva, Tenreyro has made a path-breaking methodological contribution which has changed the way scholars estimate gravity equations for trade flows (or other “flow relations” from migration to capital movement). Her PPML method is now the standard method to estimate and interpret these equations.

Collectively, her research bridges academic theory and practical policy, shaping how central banks and international institutions think about macro stabilization.

About Silvana Tenreyro

María Silvana Tenreyro CBE FBA is a British-Italian-Argentine economist and Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). She served as an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee from 2017 to 2023 and was President of the European Economic Association in 2021. She studied economics at the National University of Tucumán in Argentina and went on to complete her MA and PhD in economics at Harvard University.

Her research in macroeconomics and international economics has been recognized with major international awards, including the Yrjö Jahnsson Award, the Birgit Grodal Award and the Carl Menger Prize. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Econometric Society, and Honorary Member of the American Economic Society, and in 2023 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the economy.