Fernando Alvarez's most influential contribution seems to be his work with Urban Jermann (Wharton) on endogenously incomplete markets. They show how the limited commitment model of Timothy Kehoe and David Levine and also of Narayana Kocherlakota can be decentralized with certain borrowing constraints. They also showed how this model could explain some feature of asset prices, such as the equity premium. Several papers have used their model later on to explain other macroeconomic phenomena.
Fernando Alvarez has also presented a new estimate of the welfare cost of business cycles, which is based on observed asset prices (with Urban Jermann). His other work includes models of monetary economies with segmented markets and search models with incomplete markets.
Alvarez, Fernando; Atkeson, Andrew; Edmond, Chris (2009). "Sluggish Responses of Prices and Inflation to Monetary Shocks in an Inventory Model of Money Demand*". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 124 (3): 911–67. CiteSeerX10.1.1.188.8630. doi:10.1162/qjec.2009.124.3.911.
Alvarez, Fernando; Veracierto, Marcelo (2001). "Severance Payments in an Economy with Frictions". Journal of Monetary Economics. 47 (3): 477–98. doi:10.1016/S0304-3932(01)00058-7.
Alvarez, Fernando (2001). "Comment on 'the Benefits of Dollarization When Stabilization Policy Lacks Credibility and Financial Markets Are Imperfect'". Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. 33 (2): 475–81. doi:10.2307/2673911. JSTOR2673911.
^"Alvarez, Fernando, 1964-". id.loc.gov. Retrieved January 7, 2021. It is not clear if he was born in September or December; there is conflicting information in the authority record.