On October 20, former Inter-American Development Bank Treasurer Søren Elbech visited the Golub Center for Finance and Policy for a lunchtime discussion with students and faculty. Drawing on his experience in capital markets...

Reverse mortgages are a financial innovation designed to help retirees free up the savings tied up in home equity without being forced to move. Access to those funds can make a big difference in the quality of life for house-rich, cash-poor, retirees. Yet the product has been slow to catch on. A new...

On July 1, 2016, the U.S. territory, which has been mired in a years-long debt crisis, failed to make good on $2 billion of bond payments due, triggering the worst default in its history. Puerto Rico’s governor Alejandro García Padilla has defended the decision to skip the full payment, emphasizing ...

Today the MIT CFP announced the winners of its first crowd-sourced contest, “What is a Systemically Important Financial Institution?” A collaboration between the MIT Center for Finance and Policy and the Harvard Crowd Innovation Laboratory, the contest was launched to generate new proposals to speci...

The MIT Center for Finance and Policy recently announced the winners [...]

High rates of debt growth by local governments are a cause for concern in any country. In China, where recent turmoil in the equity and foreign-exchange markets has put a spotlight on that country’s economy and growth prospects, increasing levels of borrowing by provincial and other lower levels of ...

We are making breakthroughs almost weekly in our understanding of cancer and other deadly diseases, both in how to treat and – in some cases – how to cure them [...]

Başak Tanyeri, an Assistant Professor of Finance at Bilkent University, visited the CFP this summer to pursue a new research project evaluating the performance of public banks. Using a large and newly available [...]

The U.S. government’s ubiquitous role providing credit—mostly to students and homeowners—in the post-financial crisis economy is unmistakable but the ultimate costs to taxpayers can be far from obvious. While nearly all of the deliberation and debate about the price of extending government credit is...

Greece recently failed to pay $1.7 billion due to the IMF, thereby becoming the first developed country to default on an IMF loan. That missed payment represents only a portion of the approximately $23 billion in IMF credit outstanding to Greece, suggesting the ultimate losses to the Fund could be m...