Faculty
Kristin Forbes is the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
She has regularly rotated between academia and senior policy positions. From 2014-2017 she was an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee for the Bank of England. From 2003 to 2005 Forbes served as a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers and from 2001-2002 she was a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Treasury Department. She also was a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers for the state of Massachusetts from 2009-2014.
In 2019, Forbes was named an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She is currently the convener of the Bellagio Group, a research associate at the NBER and CEPR, and a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group and Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves in a number of advisory positions, such as the Monetary Policy Advisory Panel of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the Advisory Panel for the Bank for International Settlements, and on the External Advisory Group of the Managing Director for the International Monetary Fund. Forbes’ academic research addresses policy-related questions in international macroeconomics, including monetary policy, macroprudential tools, capital flows, exchange rates, inflation, and contagion. She has won numerous teaching awards and teaches one of the most popular classes at MIT's Sloan School. Before joining MIT, Forbes worked at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley.
She received her PhD in Economics from MIT and graduated summa cum laude with highest honors from Williams College.
Du, Wenxin, Kristin J. Forbes, and Matthew N. Luzzetti, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7159-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2024. NBER Working Paper 32321.
Kristin J. Forbes. In Economic Policy Symposium: Reassessing the Effectiveness and Transmission of Monetary Policy, Jackson Hole, WY: August 2024. Download Paper.
Forbes, Kristin J., Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose. VoxEU. CEPR, August 2024.
Forbes, Kristin J. In Floating Exchange Rates at Fifty, edited by Doug Irwin and Maury Obstfeld, Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2024. Download Preprint.
Forbes, Kristin J. Financial Times, March 4, 2024.
Du, Wenxin, Kristin J. Forbes, and Matthew Luzzetti. Presentation, US Monetary Policy Forum, New York, United States. March 1, 2024. Financial Times Op-Ed.
New MIT Sloan research on patterns in interest rate cycles shows that the transition from hiking to cutting rates does not necessarily imply that interest rates will fall back to low levels.
Susan M. Collins discusses managing inflation and AI in finance.
"How much unemployment or slowdown in growth should we be willing to accept to shorten the length of time that inflation is too high?"
"They'll have to go back to making it more symmetric of how they think about both inflation and unemployment."
"I think we've learned the need to allow central banks to be preemptive and start raising interest rates ahead of time."
The main topic of discussion at the US Monetary Policy Forum was the newly released paper "Quantitative Tightening Around the Globe ..."
