Faculty
Deborah Lucas is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.
Lucas’s recent research lies at the intersection of finance and policy, with a focus on applying the insights of financial economics to measure the costs and risks of a broad range of government financial activities. Some current projects include developing and applying new methods to measure the value of government subsidies to development banks and other state-owned enterprises (SOEs); improving the measurement of the fiscal and macroeconomic effects of credit support and guarantee policies; creating an international inventory of credit subsidies to the energy sector; compiling a world atlas of government financial institutions; evaluating the sustainability of state and local pension systems in a stochastic framework; and analyzing the costs and welfare consequences of government financial products such as reverse mortgages and mortgage credit risk transfer securities.
Current affiliations include visiting scholar at the International Montetary Fund, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, member of the Academic Research Council of the Housing Policy Center at the Urban Institute, member of the Shadow Open Market Committee, and trustee for the NBER pension plans. She is on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and serves as an independent director of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, P/E Investments, and NatureServe. Elected positions include member of the National Academy of Public Administration, member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, Senior Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research, and Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Previous appointments include chief economist, and subsequently assistant and associate director at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, member on two Social Security Technical Advisory Panels, senior staff economist for U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and coeditor of the JMCB. An expert on U.S. federal credit programs, she has testified before the U.S. Congress on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, student loans, and strategically important financial institutions.
Lucas received her BA, MA, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
Lucas, Deborah J. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Forthcoming.
Krahnen, Jan Pieter, Ted Lindblom, Deborah J. Lucas, Magnus Olsson, Paolo Fulghieri, and Anjan Thakor. Journal of Financial Intermediation. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
Deborah J. Lucas. In SOMC 50th Anniversary Conference Volume, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA:. Forthcoming.
Deborah J. Lucas. In NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2024, Chicago, IL: April 2024.
Deborah J. Lucas. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Policy Hub Vol. 2024, No. 3 (2024): 1-29.
Lucas, Deborah J. Annual Review of Financial Economics Vol. 15, (2023): 115-125.
The biennial prize recognizes an individual who had made outstanding contributions to the advancement of financial policy research or practice, which is the core mission of the MIT GCFP.
Four MIT Sloan economists on lessons learned and next steps after the demise of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic.
Professor Deborah Lucas said economic bailouts have become "unnecessarily frequent and wide-ranging." A so-called "bailout culture" has become somewhat normalized, said Lucas. "The expansion of deposit guarantees to uninsured depositors following Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in 2023 exemplifies this trend," she added.
"The Fed has shown inflation is declining and it can take the labor market into consideration. This is very good news for interest rate cuts."
Deborah J. Lucas said that every economist at the Jackson Hole Symposium will try to share their opinion on what the Fed should do next.
"The duration gap provides information that even the most astute market analysts would not be able to infer from currently mandated disclosures."
