Faculty
SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. At MIT, he is also co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work and a Research Affiliate at Blueprint Labs. With Gary Gensler, Johnson runs a podcast on policy, technology and economics: Power and Consequences.
In December 2024, Johnson received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, joint with Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
In December 2025, Johnson was named an “AI Ambassador” by the British government. In this capacity, he assists with the Tech Town initiative and other efforts to develop technology applications that boost productivity and share prosperity.
In 2007-08, Johnson was chief economist and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council with Erkki Liikanen. He is a Research Associate at the NBER and a Fellow at CEPR.
Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence. Power and Progress has been published in about 20 languages around the world. It was long listed for the 2023 Financial Times and Schroders Book of the Year and for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and it was shortlisted for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize. Johnson draws on this research as an unpaid adviser to the British government on the question of how Artificial Intelligence can be used to create more good jobs and boost shared prosperity.
His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support, as reflected in the 2022 Chips and Science Act.
Johnson was previously a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors, and a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to early 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group. From February 2021 to March 2025, Johnson was a member of the board of directors of Fannie Mae, where he was at various times vice chair of the audit committee, vice chair of the compensation committee, and a member of the risk and capital committee. Building on this extensive experience, Johnson is currently (unpaid) co-chair of the academic advisory board for Better Markets, an organization that advocates for more effective financial regulation and higher levels of loss-absorbing equity capital for banks.
“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research papers on long-term economic development, corporate finance, political economy, and public health are widely cited.
“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail”, Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013. In 2024, the contributions of Johnson and his colleagues during the COVID pandemic were recognized by the Nursing Home Association of Massachusetts. And on July 4th, 2025, the Carnegie Corporation of New York honored Johnson as one of its Great Immigrants, “an extraordinary group of immigrants who have made notable contributions to the progress of American society.”
Johnson has a BA from the University of Oxford, an MA from the University of Manchester, and a PhD from MIT. He held a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University (1989-91) and was junior faculty at Duke University (1991-96). In 2025 he was elected an honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied as an undergraduate, 1981-84. In December 2025 he became a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society (FREcon).
Important: For all media inquires, please make sure you copy Michelle Fiorenza, fiorenza@mit.edu
Photo: Malin Lauterbach / EFN
Johnson, Simon, Lukasz Rachel, and Catherine Wolfram. American Economic Review. Forthcoming. NBER Preprint.
Johnson, Simon, Daron Acemoglu, and Ufuk Akcigit. In Handbook of Development Economics, Cambridge, MA: Elsevier. Forthcoming. NBER Preprint.
Johnson, Simon. In Oxford Handbook of Income Distribution and Economic Growth, edited by Gordon Anderson and Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson. In Hamilton Project, Washington, D.C.: February 2026.
Gensler, Gary, Simon Johnson, Ugo Panizza, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro (Eds.). Washington, D.C.: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2025. Second Edition - December 2025. First Edition - June 2025.
Johnson, Simon. American Economic Review Vol. 115, No. 6 (2025): 1749-1786.
Here are six titles connected to the MIT Sloan School of Management covering topics such as economic strategy, entrepreneurship, talent management, and cultural evolution in the age of AI.
To realize the greatest gains from artificial intelligence, we must make the future of work more human, not less.
Professor Simon Johnson and co-author wrote: "A partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz may be on the horizon. But is a lasting regional settlement any closer? The prevailing narrative is that the United States has lost control over the situation in the Persian Gulf. And it is certainly true that Iran has acquired a powerful card — the ability to threaten shipping in the Strait — that it did not previously hold."
A report by the New York City comptroller argues that the city's economy will be transformed by artificial intelligence. "You're going to get a lot of automation, which means replacing people with algorithms," said professor Simon Johnson, adding that the A.I. boom is likely to displace at least some white-collar workers and that it is not yet clear who will benefit from any potential job gains. Historically, Mr. Johnson added, new digital technologies have tended to make inequality worse.
Professor Simon Johnson discussed how six sectors may determine the future of America's technology leadership in this "Bloomberg Talks" podcast episode.
AI's "potential for job destruction is very significant, and those who hold capital will get richer," said professor Simon Johnson. For him, what's needed is "worker-friendly AI," a technology that enhances human capabilities, accelerates the acquisition of expertise, and creates new tasks, instead of rendering human skills obsolete.
The AI Adoption: Driving Business Value and Impact 6-week course from MIT Sloan equips you to move from AI awareness to AI transformation throughout your organization. You'll map AI technologies to your critical business challenges and opportunities, navigate adoption barriers, and build sustainable co-creation practices that amplify human capability rather than replace it.
Over six weeks, you’ll explore the technical and strategic considerations for robust, beneficial, and responsible AI deployment. You’ll examine the various stages of a proprietary ML Deployment Framework and unlock new opportunities by investigating the key challenges and their related impact. Guided by leading experts and MIT academics, you’ll build a toolkit for addressing these challenges within your own organization and context.
