Maryam Farboodi

Maryam Farboodi, the Jon D. Gruber Career Development Associate Professor and an associate professor of Finance has won 2024 Elaine Bennett Research Prize.

The Elaine Bennett Research Prize was established in 1998, and recognizes and honors outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman not more than 10 years beyond her PhD. The prize is supported by contributions from William Zame and others,  in memory of Elaine Bennett, who made significant contributions in economic theory and experimental economics and encouraged the work of young women in all areas of economics.

In the award citation, Farboodi is recognized for making several significant contributions to the understanding of how economic growth interacts with the evolving role of big data in the financial sector. For example, her influential paper with Laura Veldkamp, “Long-Run Growth of Financial Data Technology,” published in the American Economic Review, demonstrates how improvement in big data technologies influences market dynamics and investor behavior.

See the American Economic Association website for more details on the award.

Maryam Farboodi (Jon D. Gruber Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Finance) has received a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is “dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge” and whose grantmaking helped create the MIT Sloan School of Management. This honor recognizes outstanding creativity, innovation, and impactful research; the achievements and potential of awarded Sloan Research Fellows “place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.”

Farboodi is one of eight MIT faculty members among the 126 Sloan Research Fellows chosen this year from over 1,000 nominations of early-career scholars by fellow scientists across seven fields—chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics (Farboodi’s awarded area), mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. This prestigious honor has not been bestowed on an MIT Sloan faculty member for over two decades (and the one prior was over 30 years ago).

The award was announced recently.

Maryam Farboodi has received the Outstanding Paper Award 2022 from the Swiss Finance Institute. This honor recognizes an unpublished research paper expected to make an outstanding contribution to the field of finance.

Farboodi’s winning paper, co-authored with Dhruv Singal (Columbia University), Laura Veldkamp (Columbia University),  and Venky Venkateswaran (New York University), is entitled “Valuing Financial Data.” It focuses on how an investor or financial firm should value financial data in today’s modern economy.

Maryam Farboodi has won the 2019 Young Researcher Award from the SCOR-PSE Chair on Macroeconomic Risk (created in 2018 by the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science and the Paris School of Economics), honoring outstanding research by a junior economist (within 10 years of PhD) in the field of macroeconomic risk. The award recognizes Farboodi for her “particularly stimulating and promising” work in financial intermediation and deliberate exposure to counterparty risk:  “innovative research, both in method and hypothesis, on the relationships between financial institutions and how these relationships may contribute to endogenous growth in systemic risk,” according to André Levy-Lang, chairman of the SCOR Foundation for Science. Farboodi presented her working paper entitled “Intermediation and Voluntary Exposure to Counterparty Risk” (October 2017) and received her award at a ceremony in July 2019 in Paris during the SCOR-PSE Chair annual conference.