Faculty
Kristin Forbes is the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
She has regularly rotated between academia and senior policy positions. From 2014-2017 she was an External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee for the Bank of England and from 2003 to 2005 she served as a Member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 2001-2002 Forbes was a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Treasury Department and over 2009-2014 she was a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers for the State of Massachusetts.
In 2019, Forbes was named an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She is currently the convener of the Bellagio Group and a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, a research associate at the NBER and CEPR, and a member of the US Monetary Policy Forum and Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves in a number of advisory positions, including for the Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund. Forbes’ academic research addresses policy-related questions in international macroeconomics, including on monetary policy, rate cycles, macroprudential regulation, capital flows, exchange rates, inflation, and financial contagion. Before joining MIT, Forbes worked at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley.
She received her PhD in economics from MIT and graduated summa cum laude with highest honors from Williams College.
Forbes, Kristin J. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2026.
Forbes, Kristin J., Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7356-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, January 2026.
Forbes, Kristin J., Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7269-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2025.
Kristin J. Forbes. In Hoover Monetary Policy Conference, Stanford, CA: May 2025.
Evans, Charles, Brian Sack, and Kristin J. Forbes. Business Economics Vol. 60, No. 2 (2025): 65-76.
Du, Wenxin, Kristin J. Forbes, and Matthew N. Luzzetti, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7159-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2024. NBER Working Paper 32321.
In her new book, The Art of Monetary Policy: Lessons from Sun Tzu for Central Banks, Professor Kristin Forbes draws on ancient strategic frameworks to show how central banks can survive this new era.
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.
In a new paper, professor Kristin Forbes and co-authors noted the U.S. has financed a lot of its deficit lately by selling stocks to foreigners. The good news, according to Forbes, is that a plunge in stocks driven, for example, by disappointment in AI would effectively write down the IOUs the U.S. issued to foreigners to finance its deficits. It could also lower the dollar, further correcting those deficits. The bad news is the losses inflicted on foreign investors could spill over to bond and currency markets.
As chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell faced several concussive events. The odds any Fed chair would face all of those shocks within eight years are roughly .018%, or 1 in 5,550, according to professor Kristin Forbes. "What we should take from this is that the global environment has changed. Central banks are no longer going to focus mainly on domestic demand shocks, with the responses pretty clear," Forbes said. "Instead, we are living in a world where central banks are going to increasingly be forced to handle major, low probability events, often which are not economic or that emerge from abroad."
In 2020, former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell unveiled a novel approach to policymaking, which involved temporarily tolerating periods of higher inflation to make up for past stretches when it was too low and to focus on "broad and inclusive" employment. "It was fighting the last war," said professor Kristin Forbes. "It wasn't thinking about how the world was changing and the bigger role of global supply shocks."
Speaking at a panel on the Persian Gulf conflict, professor Kristin Forbes stressed that policymakers must look beyond annual trade flows to the growing stock of global imbalances. "They've almost doubled over the last 15 years," she said, warning that rising external positions heighten exposure to shifts in exchange rates and interest rates.
