Faculty
Taha Choukhmane is the Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor in Global Management an Associate 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 studies the drivers of household saving and investment decisions, and how employer and government policies influence lifelong financial security. His current research examines how 401(k) plan design affects retirement preparedness and inequality, how increasing retirement contributions affects other aspects of household finances (including debt and spending), and whether artificial intelligence can provide quality personal financial advice.
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.
Large language models encourage smart financial behavior, but they fall short on the more subtle aspects of saving and investing, according to MIT Sloan’s Taha Choukhmane and co-authors.
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.
Associate professor Taha Choukhmane believes that artificial intelligence can be especially useful at the beginning of the documentation process. He recommends using AI to explain concepts like the stock market, mutual funds, or index funds, followed by verifying the information with trusted sources. One problem is that AI responses can vary depending on how questions are phrased. Choukhmane also recommends asking for references to verify the information received.
Associate professor Taha Choukhmane recently co-authored a paper that found that AI does well at giving fairly broad economic advice. "It tends to push people toward saving more, participating more in the stock market, and de-risking as they get older," Choukhmane said. "It gets a lot of things right." But the AI didn't always give advice that lined up with what human financial experts would suggest. The researchers concluded that the AI suggested riskier financial moves for men than for women.
Using AI as a tool at the start of a learning journey and then combining this knowledge with other trusted sources can be the best way to engage with new and traditional financial guidance tools, said associate professor Taha Choukhmane. "I would encourage people to use AI to explain and define. If you're interested in knowing what the stock market is, what the difference between a mutual fund and an index fund is. Using AI to explain these concepts can be very useful because it can empower people to get the most out of these methods," he said.
A study by associate professor Taha Choukhmane and co-authors found that AI-generated financial advice moves people closer to sound long-term financial behavior, but the benefits are not distributed equally. "Regular people are not writing their prompts the way a finance professor is," said Choukhmane. AI systems tend to produce stronger financial recommendations when users provide richer context about their circumstances, he explained.
