Faculty
Taha Choukhmane is 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, Jorge Colmenares, Cormac O'Dea, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Lawrence D.W. Schmidt. American Economic Review. Forthcoming. NBER Preprint.
Choukhmane, Taha, Tim de Silva, Weidong Lin, and Matthew Akuzawa, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7377-26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2026. Download Preprint.
Choukhmane, Taha, and Tim de Silva. Journal of Finance Vol. 81, No. 5 (2026): 5-48. NBER Preprint.
Choukhmane, Taha. American Economic Review Vol. 115, No. 11 (2025): 3749-3787.
Choukhmane, Taha and Christopher J. Palmer, Working Paper. September 2025.
Banerjee, Sudipto, Louisa Schafer, Taha Choukehmane, and Tim de Silva. T. Rowe Price, July 2025.
MIT Sloan assistant professor Taha Choukhmane found that following AI financial advice would move people closer to the saving, spending, and investing patterns recommended by standard economic models.
When employers hold back wages for retirement savings, younger consumers and less-wealthy people cut their spending. Wealthier individuals tap their deposit accounts.
In a new working paper, assistant professor Taha Choukhmane and co-authors studied what Americans were asking AI about money, and what AI was telling them in response. Choukhmane and his colleagues asked 1,000 Americans to write out questions they might send to a chatbot. The researchers found that AI consistently gave better advice to people who asked better questions. "It might be that AI is going to be more useful for people who already know a little bit about finance and financial literacy," Choukhmane said.
Assistant professor Taha Choukhmane, co-author of a study on retirement savings, explained that "there are pretty large gains to coordinating your finances," particularly when it comes to retirement savings. "We find that couples leave quite a lot of money on the table every year."
Research by assistant professor Taha Choukhmane and co-authors found that many couples fail to direct their 401(k) contributions toward the spouse with the better employer match. "By not focusing on the highest match, couples may sacrifice an average of $14,000 in retirement wealth over their lifetime, which may climb to as high as $40,000 in additional wealth at retirement for 10% of couples," said Choukhmane.
By switching retirement contributions to the account with the higher match rate, 1 in 5 couples could increase their savings by an estimated $750 per year according to research by assistant professor Taha Choukhmane and co-authors. Choukmane said the research aims to gauge whether couples coordinate their finances as a household or instead manage their money individually. "The absence of coordination can be a choice, but it's a costly choice," he said.
