Faculty
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Visiting Professor at IESA (Venezuela).Roberto is a macroeconomist who concentrates on measurement issues: economic, social, and ethical. He studies financial contagion and the propagation of shocks through economic networks. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, which produces alternative measures of inflation in many countries. He is also a cofounder and director of the Aggregate Confusion Project, which studies how to improve ESG measures. Recently, he’s been studying how human capabilities can complement AI.Roberto joined MIT Sloan in 1997. Since then, he has been named the Teacher of the Year five times and has received three Excellence in Teaching awards from the School. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is happily married and a proud father of three.
Berg, Florian, Marco Ceccarelli, Florian Heeb, Alexey Ivashchenko, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7345-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, November 2025.
Cavallo, Alberto and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7322-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2025. SSRN.
van der Kroft, Bram, Juan Palacios, Roberto Rigobon, and Siqi Zheng, Working Paper. August 2025. SSRN.
David Craig, San Cannon, and Roberto Rigobon. Madrid, Spain: June 2025.
Loaiza, Isabella, Roberto Vestrelli, Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7323-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, June 2025.
Berg, Florian, Jaime Oliver Huidobro, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6969-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025.
Transformative technologies like artificial intelligence succeed when societies make parallel social investments to ensure gains are distributed equitably, MIT Sloan researchers find.
MIT Sloan’s leading thinkers in economics, sustainability, and organizational studies agree: Embracing the human elements of our work is more critical than ever.
The voluntary carbon market (VCM) prices credits based more on who is buying them than on how much good they do for the climate, according to research by professor Roberto Rigobon, principal research scientist Florian Berg, and co-authors — a finding that raises fundamental questions about whether the market is channeling money toward the most effective climate solutions. The study analyzed more than 7,200 real transactions made between 2018 and 2024, covering roughly 11% of the global secondary VCM by dollar value.
Professor Roberto Rigobon said: "When one party has a monopoly and another doesn't, the relationship ceases to be mutually beneficial and becomes a zero-sum game. The real challenge is to prevent the new digital economy from concentrating even more power in the hands of a few players."
In a recent research paper, "Measuring by Executive Order," professor Roberto Rigobon and co-author pointed out multiple distortions in statistics along with the absolute need for reliable data.
According to research by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza, the five capabilities where human workers shine and AI faces limitations are empathy, presence, opinion, creativity and hope, which they've captured as the EPOCH Framework. They emphasize the importance of upskilling the workforce on what they call the "fundamental qualities of human nature."
For many companies, the topic of sustainability is at the forefront of business agendas. Consumers and stakeholders are demanding greater accountability from organizations, and the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly stringent. However, pursuing the environmental, social, and governance impacts of business is often met with tension. Leaders now need to manage the misconception within business that meeting sustainability goals means compromising profits.
This international economics program presents tools and frameworks to help executives understand and predict the medium- to long-run performance of economies in order to mitigate risk, develop growth plans, and make investment decisions, both locally and abroad. Participants will leave this macroeconomics course better able to make business decisions that take global markets and macroeconomics into account and how to interpret economic change in the context of their organization.
