Professor Ramirez is a native of Chile and a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1990. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and has been at Trinity College since 1985. He has held visiting positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Summer 1991 and 1992), Haverford College (Spring 1992), Vanderbilt University (Spring 1999), and Yale University (Spring 2006). His teaching interests are primarily in the areas of Latin American economic development and international finance and open economy macroeconomics. Before retiring at the end of AY2023-24, he usually offered Latin American economic development and Structural Reform in Latin America during the fall term, while he taught international finance and open economy macroeconomics during the spring term. He also taught a course in Time-Series Analysis every other spring term, with particular emphasis on unit root and cointegration analysis, error correction modeling, and forecasting.

Insofar as his research is concerned, it is primarily dedicated to analyzing the challenges and opportunities that Latin American nations face as they attempt to stabilize and reform their economies in an increasingly globalized world. In particular, his work has reviewed and analyzed the impact of IMF-sponsored adjustment and stabilization measures in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, as well as the mixed success of structural reform programs such as privatization of state-owned firms, deregulation of economic activity, and liberalization of trade and finance. His research has also focused on the economic and institutional determinants of foreign direct investment in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, as well as the impact of these flows on private capital formation and labor productivity growth in Latin America. Another important focus of his work in recent years has been the growing role of remittance flows in financing private investment spending and boosting economic growth in countries such as Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Mexico. In recent years he has published work in the history of economic thought relating to Marx's important analysis of wages and cyclical crises, his theory of absolute and differential ground rent, his analysis of the falling rate of profit, Marx's controversial writings on the so-called Asiatic mode of production, and his conception of capital as a social process. Finally, he has also published and undertaken research on David Ricardo's views on absolute and relative value in terms of labor values.