Faculty
Taha Choukhmane is the Class of 1947 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests lie at the intersection of household finance and behavioral economics, with a focus on households’ saving decisions.
Taha received his PhD in economics at Yale University, where he was awarded the George Trimis Dissertation Prize. He is the recipient of a grant from the Social Security Administration, and he was a dissertation fellow of the Boston College Center for Retirement Research and a graduate policy fellow at Yale’s Institute of Social and Policy Studies.
Current Research Focus: Choukhmane’s research focuses on the way households make their saving and investment decisions. His current research projects examine the behavior of participants in retirement savings plans: the behavioral biases that affect their investment and portfolio-allocation decisions, and the extent to which married couples coordinate their saving decisions. Another area of ongoing research explores how the design of retirement saving incentives contributes to racial wealth inequality.
Choukhmane, Taha, Lucas Goodman, and Cormac O’Dea, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6139-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2023. NBER Working Paper 31195.
Choukhmane, Taha, Nicolas Coeurdacier, and Keyu Jin, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6138-17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2021.
Choukhmane, Taha, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6134-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, June 2021.
These faculty members are experts in decision-making, behavioral economics, and more.
A recent working paper by Taha Choukhmane found that couples with poor retirement allocations left roughly $700 on the table per year.
Couples are not effectively coordinating their retirement contributions, robbing the average household of 10% of potential contributions.
"Once you add the tax incentive [to contribute] and the employer match, the gap with Blacks and Hispanics is even larger."
Taha Choukhmane says: “The worst thing you can do in a tough financial situation is just to let it accumulate and not face it up front.”
