What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
Sound economic planning and policymaking requires trustworthy data. Private data can serve as a complement but not fully replace official U.S. statistics.
Faculty
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Visiting Professor at IESA (Venezuela).Roberto is a macroeconomist who concentrates on measurement issues: economic, social, and ethical. He studies financial contagion and the propagation of shocks through economic networks. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, which produces alternative measures of inflation in many countries. He is also a cofounder and director of the Aggregate Confusion Project, which studies how to improve ESG measures. Recently, he’s been studying how human capabilities can complement AI.Roberto joined MIT Sloan in 1997. Since then, he has been named the Teacher of the Year five times and has received three Excellence in Teaching awards from the School. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is happily married and a proud father of three.
Berg, Florian, Marco Ceccarelli, Florian Heeb, Alexey Ivashchenko, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7345-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, November 2025.
Cavallo, Alberto and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7322-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2025. SSRN.
van der Kroft, Bram, Juan Palacios, Roberto Rigobon, and Siqi Zheng, Working Paper. August 2025. SSRN.
David Craig, San Cannon, and Roberto Rigobon. Madrid, Spain: June 2025.
Loaiza, Isabella, Roberto Vestrelli, Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7323-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, June 2025.
Berg, Florian, Jaime Oliver Huidobro, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6969-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025.
Sound economic planning and policymaking requires trustworthy data. Private data can serve as a complement but not fully replace official U.S. statistics.
Experts in artificial intelligence from MIT Sloan are keeping an eye on the human-LLM accuracy gap, AI guardrails, and other trends.
In a recent research paper, "Measuring by Executive Order," professor Roberto Rigobon and co-author pointed out multiple distortions in statistics along with the absolute need for reliable data.
According to research by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza, the five capabilities where human workers shine and AI faces limitations are empathy, presence, opinion, creativity and hope, which they've captured as the EPOCH Framework. They emphasize the importance of upskilling the workforce on what they call the "fundamental qualities of human nature."
A recent paper by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza-Saa found that it is easier for humans to trust other humans than it is to trust technology, and the high-risk industry of money management intensifies the need for human connection. "The financial sector should be really careful about introducing technology that might erode trust," Loaiza-Saa said.
These days, a lot of workers have been asking themselves whether AI is coming for their jobs. In a recent paper professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa(SM '19, PhD '23) came up with a measure of how much AI might be used to augment selected jobs and then calculated a measure of the risk of being replaced by AI.
MIT Sloan faculty will present cutting-edge research and insights on three of the most pressing questions shaping the future workforce in relation to generative AI
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