Roberto Rigobon

Support Staff

John Tracey-Ursprung

(617) 253-8318
jtracey@mit.edu

About

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

MIT Sloan Professor Roberto Rigobon and two MIT researchers – Florian Berg and Julian Koelbel – have won two awards from the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI): the 2020 GRASFI Best Paper Prize and the 2020 GRASFI Best Paper Prize on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Standards. Their dual-winning paper is entitled “Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings.” Videos of the award presentations (September 2020), including the authors discussing their winning paper, are at: 2020 GRASFI Best Paper Prize and 2020 GRASFI Best Paper Prize on ESG Standards.

Publications

"Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings."

Berg, Florian, Julian F. Koelbel, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 5822-19. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2020.

"Contagion, Spillover, and Interdependence."

Rigobon, Roberto. Economia Vol. 19, No. 2 (2019): 69-99. Download Paper.

"Measuring Sovereign Contagion in Europe."

Caporin, Massimiliano, Loriana Pelizzon, Francesco Ravazzolo, and Roberto Rigobon. Journal of Financial Stability Vol. 34, (2018): 150-181. Download Paper.

"A Micro-Based Model for World Oil Market."

Espinasa, Ramon, Enrique ter Horst, Sergio Guerra Reyes, Osmel Manzano, German Molina, and Roberto Rigobon. Energy Economics Vol. 66, No. 1 (2017): 431-449.

Principles and Practices for Federal Program Evaluation.

Groves, Robert, et al. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017.

Federal Statistics, Multiple Data Sources, and Privacy Protection: Next Step.

Groves, Robert, et al. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017.

Recent Insights

Press

Aggregate Confusion Project: Improving the quality of ESG measurement

The project is charting a course toward more rigorous, coherent methods for ESG integration, with four key goals that are relevant to asset owners and managers, as well as regulators.