Jonathan A. Parker

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Jonathan A. Parker

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Jonathan A. Parker is the Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Finance, Head of the MIT Sloan Finance Department, and codirector of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

He has held numerous service positions and consulting positions, including Area Head of Economics, Finance, and Accounting at Sloan, editor of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual, and special adviser on Financial Stability for the Office of Financial Stability in the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009. He currently serves as an economic adviser for the Congressional Budget Office, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, an academic advisor to the JP Morgan Chase Institute, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review. An expert in finance, macroeconomics, and household behavior, Parker has published widely on topics such as macroeconomic risks and asset returns, fiscal stabilization policy, national saving, household financial decisions, the measurement of business cycles, and modeling human economic behavior.

Current Research Focus: Parker has contributed broadly to research on household finance, FinTech, financial markets, macroeconomics, and public policy.  A major part of his research has been documenting the important role of liquidity for household spending decisions. Current and recent research topics include measuring the evolution of household portfolios, risk taking, and beliefs; developing machine learning techniques to solve for optimal household portfolios; measuring the impact of household financial innovations on stock market dynamics; and the impact of the COVID crisis and policy responses on the standards of living of typical Americans and on small business owners.

Publications

"A Dynamic Theory of Lending Standards."

Fishman, Michael J., Jonathan A. Parker, and Ludwig Straub. The Review of Financial Studies. Forthcoming. Appendix.

"Target Date Funds as Asset Market Stabilizers: Evidence from the Pandemic."

Parker, Jonathan A. and Yang Sun. Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, 20th Anniversary Special Issue. Forthcoming.

"Revenue Collapses and the Consumption of Small Business Owners in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic."

Kim, Olivia S., Jonathan A. Parker, and Antoinette Schoar, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6232-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, February 2024.

"Household Portfolios and Retirement Saving over the Life Cycle."

Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, Allison Cole, and Duncan Simester (Conditionally Accepted at Journal of Finance), MIT Sloan Working Paper 6226-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2023. Appendix.

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