Faculty
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.
Parker, Jonathan A. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics Vol. 9, No. 4 (2017): 153-183. Publisher Page. Online appendix.
Brunnermeier, Markus K., Filippos Papakonstantinou, and Jonathan A. Parker. Management Science Vol. 63, No. 5 (2017): 1318-1340. Online Appendix.
Meeuwis, Maarten, Jonathan A. Parker, Antoinette Schoar, and Duncan I. Simester. Journal of Finance Vol. 77, No. 6 (2022): 3191-3247. Appendix. SSRN.
Jonathan A. Parker, Jake Schild, Laura Erhard, and David S. Johnson. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C.: September 2022. Appendix. Brookings Summary. Video of Presentation.
Duarte, Victor, Julia Fonseca, Aaron Goodman, and Jonathan A. Parker, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6460-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2022.
Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, Allison Cole, and Duncan Simester, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6226-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, March 2022. Appendix.
Four MIT Sloan economists on lessons learned and next steps after the demise of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic.
MIT Sloan’s Consumer Finance Initiative delves into household finance, fintech, crypto, savings and lending markets, and retirement funds.
Regulators should force banks to raise more capital to make sure they can continue to "lend freely going forward," said Prof. Jonathan Parker.
MIT Sloan research focused on the portfolio changes made by a large group of investors in the wake of the November 2016 election.
"We show that the rise of TDFs has changed the flow of investor funds across funds and started affecting the prices and returns of stocks."
Workers can prepare for the possibility of a layoff by researching ahead of time whether they would be eligible for unemployment insurance.
