Roberto Rigobon

Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Rigobon’s areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. In international economics, he focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as “contagion.” He has developed econometric techniques to determine the existence of contagion and the extent of it. Currently, Rigobon is working with Anna Pavlova to develop theoretical models of multiple assets in general equilibrium to study the interaction between terms of trade, stock markets, exchange rates, and financial constraints. He also is working with Gita Gopinath in a series of papers on understanding the international pricing practices of firms.

In monetary economics, he studies the behavior of financial markets and their interaction with monetary policy. In particular, his two most recent papers in the area study: how the Federal Reserve in the United States determines its interest rate policy when there is an increase in the stock market index, and the impact of monetary policy shocks on asset prices. He currently is studying the impact of war-related events on asset prices as well as the impact of macroeconomic announcements on the stock market and the yield curve. Most of this research is joint work with Brian Sack. They have developed the empirical methodologies to attend the problems of simultaneous equations and errors-in-variables that afflict the data and made impossible the estimation of these questions with standard econometric techniques.

In development economics, Rigobon has studied the behavior of the exchange rate when countries implement fiscal reforms, when central banks intervene in the foreign exchange rate market, as well as when there are financial imperfections and capital controls. Currently, he is studying the impact of institutions on the income disparities across countries, and also is measuring how income levels determine the quality of institutions.

Rigobon holds a USB in electrical engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela; an MBA from Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración; and a PhD in economics from MIT.