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 Stone Center Initiative and a Research Affiliate at Blueprint Labs.
In 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 2007-08, Johnson was chief economist and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He currently cochairs 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 is currently scheduled for publication 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.
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 vice chair of the audit committee, vice chair of the compensation committee, and a member of the risk and capital committee.
“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.
Important: For all media inquires, please make sure you copy Michelle Fiorenza, fiorenza@mit.edu
Acemoglu, Daron and Simon Johnson. Annual Review of Economics Vol. 16, No. 597-621 (2024).
Johnson, Simon and Catherine Wolfram. Brookings Institution Working Paper (2024). Appendix.
Johnson, Simon and Daron Acemoglu. Project Syndicate, January 2, 2024.
Acemoglu, Daron and Simon Johnson. Project Syndicate, December 15, 2023.
Capraro, Valerio, Austin Lentsch, and Daron Acemoglu et al., Working Paper. December 2023.
Johnson, Simon, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Ilona Sologoub. Project Syndicate, December 4, 2023.
Sometimes, an MIT Sloan Action Learning team is so successful that it calls for an encore. That’s what happened for MBA ’25 students Shawn George, Neha Golakia, Trung Nguyen, and Nisha Patel when they teamed up again for a Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) project in Brazil after a successful ASEAN Lab project in Malaysia last year.
Nobel laureate Simon Johnson says that AI can be an equalizing force, but warns that new technology does not automatically benefit everyone.
Professor Simon Johnson explained that the risk lies not only in technological innovation, but in the classic dynamics of financial panic: "These digital assets are creating a new layer of finance that currently lacks adequate security mechanisms. We already know what happens when a sector that manages demand deposits lacks solid collateral: trust is broken and mass exodus is triggered," he said.
Professor Simon Johnson said: "If technology becomes a tool for control from above and for forcing opinions on people, it will be a disaster. If technology is shaped by ordinary people with their dreams and hopes, we will get more diverse results. Then technology serves people instead of the other way around."
Professor Simon Johnson wrote: "Elected political leaders often express frustration with monetary policymakers. This is the current situation in the United States, where President Trump is determined to subordinate the Federal Reserve to his will. At this stage political leaders' top policy advisers typically point out that undermining (or eliminating) central-bank independence is likely to prove to be entirely self-defeating."
In this broadcast interview professor Simon Johnson said: "We've had some episodes historically where broad, intense, and even rapid technological change has benefited a lot of people and we've had other episodes where broader sets of society have not done particularly well. So, which one is AI going to be?"
This eight-week online program offers you the opportunity to explore macroeconomics from a business perspective, guided by renowned economist Professor Roberto Rigobon.
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.
