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.
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.
Loaiza, Isabella and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7236-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2024.
Sound economic planning and policymaking requires trustworthy data. Private data can serve as a complement but not fully replace official U.S. statistics.
Experts in artificial intelligence from MIT Sloan are keeping an eye on the human-LLM accuracy gap, AI guardrails, and other trends.
A recent paper by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza-Saa found that it is easier for humans to trust other humans than it is to trust technology, and the high-risk industry of money management intensifies the need for human connection. "The financial sector should be really careful about introducing technology that might erode trust," Loaiza-Saa said.
These days, a lot of workers have been asking themselves whether AI is coming for their jobs. In a recent paper professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa(SM '19, PhD '23) came up with a measure of how much AI might be used to augment selected jobs and then calculated a measure of the risk of being replaced by AI.
Discussing her research on AI in the workplace, co-authored with professor Roberto Rigobon, post-doctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa said, "Clerical type of jobs can be more easily automated, but a great number of occupations are not going to be as impacted. Occupations that require critical thinking, judgment, and even creativity are not going to go away."
A recent study by professor Roberto Rigobon, Isabella Loaiza, and co-authors showed that LLMs consistently suggested that countries have less press freedom than official reports. The study found the LLMs distorting and under-counting the press freedom in nations that actually place relatively few restrictions on journalists. "Access to reliable information on the state and health of the institutions that uphold democracy is critical for civic participation," said Rigobon.
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