Baffi Centre gives a grant to the PhD student Ruben Fernandez Fuertes

Ruben Fernandez Fuertes, a Bocconi PhD student, received a grant from Baffi Centre.

Thanks to his promising research project, he has been selected and offered a research contract within his PhD Year 5.

Fernandez Fuertes’ contract, running from September 2025 to June 2026, will involve producing a research report for the centre's series on pioneering topic.  The study will use AI to understand and anticipate monetary policy surprises. This researchwill be essential for financial markets.

The initiative objective is to foster the production of research by Bocconi PhD students on topics relevant for the Baffi centre.

Baffi has selected among the research projects of Bocconi PhD students that they submit to the initiative in the Spring of their PhD Year 4. Ideally, the research project should be the first draft of their future job-market paper (JMP). 

Ruben Fernandez Fuertes (in photo) is a PhD candidate in Economics & Finance (Finance track) at Bocconi University. His research brings large-language models (LLMs) into empirical macro-finance by treating documents as data. In hib job-market paper, he uses LLMs to extract a time series of “narrative surprises” that unifies the narrative and high-frequency approaches to identifying monetary-policy shocks. His method draws only on publicly released documents, so it delivers timely shock estimates without waiting for the five-year embargo on internal central-bank records. He further shows that coordinating several task-specific LLMs yields a more precise and robust shock series than relying on a single model.

Massimiliano Marcellino, Baffi Centre Director, commented: “I would like to congratulate Ruben for the work he has done so far and for what I am sure will become a great job market paper. I looking forward to his collaboration with the Baffi Centre”.

“I am sincerely grateful for this scholarship, which provides invaluable support as I complete my PhD. This recognition deepens my commitment to research at use of AI in economics research, particularly in applying large language models to monetary policy analysis", explained Fernandez Fuertes.