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 Vol. 77, No. 6 (2022): 3191-3247. Appendix. SSRN.
Jonathan A. Parker, Jake Schild, Laura Erhard, and David S. Johnson. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C.: September 2022. Appendix. Brookings Summary. Video of Presentation.
Duarte, Victor, Julia Fonseca, Aaron Goodman, and Jonathan A. Parker, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6460-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2022.
Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, Allison Cole, and Duncan Simester, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6226-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, March 2022. Appendix.
The average U.S. investor holds more of their wealth in the stock market than in prior decades — a trend drastically accelerated by target date funds.
New research shows that few people spent their economic impact payments in the early days of the pandemic. Those who did spend really needed the money.
Workers can prepare for the possibility of a layoff by researching ahead of time whether they would be eligible for unemployment insurance.
"The goal was a pandemic insurance, to make sure that people who were falling through the cracks could pay their bills."
"The small, short-term spending response and its pattern suggest that the (payments) went to many people who did not need the funds.”
People were much slower to spend their government checks during the pandemic than they were during similar programs in 2001 and 2008.
