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.
Featured Publication
"Why Don't Households Smooth Consumption? Evidence from a 25 Million Dollar Experiment."Parker, Jonathan A. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics Vol. 9, No. 4 (2017): 153-183. Publisher Page. Online appendix.
Featured Publication
"Optimal Time-Inconsistent Beliefs: Misplanning, Procrastination, and Commitment."Brunnermeier, Markus K., Filippos Papakonstantinou, and Jonathan A. Parker. Management Science Vol. 63, No. 5 (2017): 1318-1340. Online Appendix.
Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, Allison Cole, and Duncan Simester, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6226-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2023. Appendix.
Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, and Yang Sun. Journal of Finance Vol. 78, No. 5 (2023): 2673-2723. Appendix.
Parker, Jonathan A. TechREG Chronicle, Competition Policy International, August 2023.
Parker, Jonathan A. and Yang Sun, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6954-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, August 2023.
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.
People who don’t have to worry about money often buy things they think of as necessities, but really aren’t, said Jonathan Parker.
"People have a fair bit of debt capacity before they start hitting constraints."
"Pre-mortems are helpful because they walk you through the process and discipline the natural tendency to be optimistic."
As TDFs have grown in size over the last two decades, the stock market has become less volatile than it would have been otherwise.
