Faculty
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.
Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto 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. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.
Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the "Teacher of the Year" award and the "Excellence in Teaching" award at MIT three times.
He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.
Cavallo, Alberto and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7322-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2025. SSRN.
van der Kroft, Bram, Juan Palacios, Roberto Rigobon, and Siqi Zheng, Working Paper. August 2025. SSRN.
Loaiza, Isabella, Roberto Vestrelli, Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7323-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, June 2025.
Berg, Florian, Jaime Oliver Huidobro, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6969-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025.
Loaiza, Isabella and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7236-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2024.
Rigobon, Roberto, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7237-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, November 2024.
From MIT experts, strategies to transform skills, roles, and human potential across your organization.
Artificial intelligence improves efficiency in risk management and compliance, but humans are still best for customer-facing tasks, a new study finds.
Discussing her research on AI in the workplace, co-authored with professor Roberto Rigobon, post-doctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa said, "Clerical type of jobs can be more easily automated, but a great number of occupations are not going to be as impacted. Occupations that require critical thinking, judgment, and even creativity are not going to go away."
A recent study by professor Roberto Rigobon, Isabella Loaiza, and co-authors showed that LLMs consistently suggested that countries have less press freedom than official reports. The study found the LLMs distorting and under-counting the press freedom in nations that actually place relatively few restrictions on journalists. "Access to reliable information on the state and health of the institutions that uphold democracy is critical for civic participation," said Rigobon.
Professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza co-authored a study examining the shift in jobs and tasks across the U.S. economy between 2016 and 2024. Rather than dispense with qualities like critical thinking and empathy, workplace technology heightened the need for workers who exhibit those attributes, Loaiza said.
A recent paper by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza-Saa evaluated AI's effects on the U.S. labor force by focusing on humans' capabilities, rather than AI's. "We need to focus on what it is that humans can do so that we can complement machines," said Loaiza-Saa.
This international economics program presents tools and frameworks to help executives understand and predict the medium- to long-run performance of economies in order to mitigate risk, develop growth plans, and make investment decisions, both locally and abroad. Participants will leave this macroeconomics course better able to make business decisions that take global markets and macroeconomics into account and how to interpret economic change in the context of their organization.
This course provides you with a balanced perspective of the crypto space. Over eight weeks, you’ll gain insights into the economics of blockchain technologies, including digital assets, stablecoins, DeFi, NFTs, and Web 3 applications. You’ll also learn about the future of blockchain technology and the possibilities that lie ahead in the crypto space — from finance to the metaverse.
