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. Forthcoming. Appendix. SSRN.
Parker, Jonathan A., Jake Schild, Laura Erhard, and David S. Johnson, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6562-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2021.
Duarte, Victor, Julia Fonseca, Aaron Goodman, and Jonathan A. Parker, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6460-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2021.
Baugh, Brian, Itzhak Ben-David, Hoonsuk Park, and Jonathan A. Parker. American Economic Review Vol. 111, No. 1 (2021): 192–230. Publisher Page.
If TDFs continue to grow in popularity, they could further decrease volatility in the stock market and increase the correlation between stocks and bonds.
Small business owners voluntarily cut personal consumption by 40% early in the pandemic. A coordinated national response could have helped.
You can do much better than the one-size-fits-all approach to equity allocations that target-date funds offer for your retirement portfolio.
"The combination of the high inflation rate and the tight labour market suggests that there is no need for strongly expansionary Fed policies."
"There is a lot of liquidity and desire to spend."
“At some point, we will have the disease mostly licked and will want the economy to recover...Will we need stimulus to spur demand at that time?"
