Rate My Professor Silvio Contessi

Silvio Contessi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash Business School, Monash University, a position he has held since his promotion from Senior Lecturer, whom he joined in 2015. Previously, he worked as a Research Economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 2008 to 2015 and served as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis from 2012 to 2015. Contessi obtained his B.A./M.A. from Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy, in 1999, an M.A. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in 2004, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in 2008, with his doctoral thesis titled "Aggregate Implications of Firm Heterogeneity in Open Economies." He has extensive teaching experience, including courses such as BFF3231 International Finance, BFF3331 International Banking and Finance, and Issues in Financial Intermediaries at Monash, as well as Understanding the Financial Crisis at Washington University in St. Louis and various international economics courses at Johns Hopkins University and Università Bocconi.

His principal research specializations encompass banking, macro-finance, and international finance, with additional interests in firm heterogeneity in open economies, trade and foreign direct investment, empirical studies of capital flows, and global inflation. Key publications include "Exchange rate regime flexibility and firms’ employment" in the Journal of International Money and Finance (2026), "Credit derivatives and bank systemic risk: risk enhancing or reducing?" and "The international spread of COVID-19 stock market collapses" both in Finance Research Letters (2021), "Mildly explosive dynamics in U.S. fixed income markets" in the European Journal of Operational Research (2020), and "Financial choice and international trade" in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2019). Contessi is the Lead Investigator of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2019-2023) on "Gross credit flows, credit reallocation, and the macroeconomy," funded at A$239,000. He received the Dean’s Commendation for Excellence in Postgraduate Coursework Teaching in 2017. Currently, he serves as Deputy Head of the Department of Banking and Finance and holds research associate positions at the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Monash Center for Development Economics and Sustainability.