Felipe Saffie

Education: B.S. and M.Sc., Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Felipe Saffie is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He teaches core macroeconomics in the MBA program across residential and part-time formats and currently serves as Course Head for GEM II. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and spent six years on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland before joining Darden in 2020.

Saffie’s research spans three main areas: international finance, international trade, and monetary and fiscal policy. In international finance, he studies how global shocks—such as capital flow volatility, sudden stops, and exchange rate movements—interact with financial frictions to shape firm dynamics, credit allocation, and productivity. In international trade, his work explores how firms reorganize supply chains and redirect exports in response to trade policy uncertainty and geopolitical tensions. His research on monetary and fiscal policy examines how firm-level heterogeneity and political economy influence the transmission of policy shocks, particularly during crises and large-scale stimulus efforts.

Across all three domains, Saffie combines granular microdata with structural macroeconomic models to understand how external shocks and policy interventions affect real economic outcomes. His research has been published in leading journals including the Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and the Journal of International Economics. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics, and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics at UVA.

Saffie has held visiting positions at the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Sciences Po in Paris. He frequently presents his work at academic conferences, universities, and policy institutions including the Federal Reserve Board, IMF, BIS, and central banks around the world. At Darden, he has developed new teaching cases on macroeconomic strategy in emerging markets and leads community-building initiatives for Latin American and international students.