Ideas Made to Matter
Why sustainable business needs better ESG ratings
Data on environmental, social, and governance performance is noisy — and may not help companies help the environment. MIT Sloan experts investigate.
Dec 6, 2021
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Roberto Rigobon
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Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.
Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.
Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the "Teacher of the Year" award and the "Excellence in Teaching" award at MIT three times.
He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.
Honors
Rigobon and colleagues win awards
Publications
"Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Rating."
Berg, Florian, Julian F Kölbel, and Roberto Rigobon. Review of Finance. Forthcoming.
"From Just in Time, to Just in Case, to Just in Worst-Case: Simple Models of a Global Supply Chain under Uncertain Aggregate Shocks."
Jiang, Bomin, Daniel Rigobon, and Roberto Rigobon. IMF Economic Review Vol. 70, No. 1 (2022): 141-184. Download Paper.
"ESG Confusion and Stock Returns: Tackling the Problem of Noise."
Berg, Florian, Julian F Kölbel, Anna Pavlova, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6483-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2021.
"Rethinking Diversity Measures in the Finance Industry."
Rigobon, Roberto. MIT Sloan Management Review, August 30, 2021.
"Multilayer Network Analysis of Oil Linkages."
Casarin, Roberto, Matteo Iacopini, German Molina, Enrique ter Horst, Ramon Espinasa, Carlos Sucre, and Roberto Rigobon. Econometrics Journal Vol. 23, No. 2 (2020): 269-296. Download Paper.
"Contagion, Spillover, and Interdependence."
Rigobon, Roberto. Economia Vol. 19, No. 2 (2019): 69-99. Download Paper.
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Ideas Made to Matter
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Media Highlights
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The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Piece)
Why do ESG ratings vary so widely – and how can investors make sense of ...
"Investors need to dive deep into the details of the different methodologies of ESG raters when the same company has different ratings."
Press
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Top1000funds
ESG data will always be imperfect, despite its critical role
“We need to learn to deal with the fact that that the data is imperfect ... and that decisions are very rarely considered just by all.”
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MBA Admissions (Blog)
Professor profiles: Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan School of Management
Prof. Roberto Rigobon has won numerous teaching awards during his time at Sloan and is primarily recognized for his accessibility.
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The Economist (Subscription Required)
The signal and the noise
A lack of reliability, comparability and transparency in ESG measurement produces "Aggregate Confusion."
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