Jonathan A. Parker

Jonathan A. Parker is the Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics, a codirector of both the MIT Sloan Consumer Finance Initiative and the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy. He is also an Economic Adviser for the Congressional Budget Office, a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Parker has served as a visiting scholar at several Federal Reserve Banks, as special adviser on Financial Stability for the Office of Financial Stability in the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009, as contractor for Fidelity, as a contractor for the JPMorgan Chase Institute, as an editor of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual, on the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review, and as both Head of the Finance Group and Area Head of Economics, Finance, and Accounting at MIT Sloan. An expert in finance, macroeconomics, and household behavior, Professor Parker has published widely on topics such as macroeconomic risks and asset returns, household financial decisions, fiscal stabilization policy, national saving, 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, financing retirement, 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.