Silvia Merler, an Italian citizen, joined Bruegel as Affiliate Fellow at Bruegel in August 2013. Her main research interests include international macro and financial economics, central banking and EU institutions and policy making. Before joining Bruegel, she worked as Economic Analyst in DG Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission (ECFIN). There she focused on macro-financial stability as well as financial assistance and stability mechanisms, in particular on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), providing supportive analysis for the policy negotiations.

 Between May 2011 and August 2012, she worked as Research Assistant to Jean Pisani-Ferry, then-director of Bruegel. During 2009 and 2010, while a student, she collaborated to research projects of Bocconi University and the Italian ENI Enrico Mattei Foundation (FEEM). During this period she was involved in the MICRODYN project, working on a cross-country and cross-sectors analysis of productivity developments with firm level data, and on the POLINARES project (“Policy for Natural Resources”). At Bruegel she has been writing on various aspects of the sovereign-banking crisis, on monetary policy, on macroeconomic imbalances and adjustment as well as on the dynamics of capital flows in the Euro Area. She contributes weekly to the Bruegel Blog and has been quoted in articles by several prominent newspapers including Bloomberg, Business Insider, Corriere della Sera, Die Welt, Ekathimerini, El Mundo, Eurointelligence, Financial Times, Jornal de Negocios, MNI News, Wall Street Journal, and The Telegraph. She also constructed two new databases (on sovereign bond holdings and ECB liquidity provisions) that have been made publicly available on the website. Born in 1986, she holds a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University in Milan and graduated in 2011 with a thesis on Current Account Imbalances within the Euro Area. She obtained a BA in Economics and Social Sciences from the same university in 2008, with a thesis on Ukraine and Moldova in the European Neighbourhood Policy.