Faculty
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.
Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.
Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the "Teacher of the Year" award and the "Excellence in Teaching" award at MIT three times.
He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.
Berg, Florian, Jaime Oliver Huidobro, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6969-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025.
Loaiza, Isabella and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7236-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2024.
Rigobon, Roberto, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7237-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, November 2024.
van der Kroft, Bram, Juan Palacios, Roberto Rigobon, and Siqi Zheng, Working Paper. July 2024. SSRN.
Jiang, Bomin, Roberto Rigobon, and Munther Dahler. In Handbook of Financial Integration, edited by Guglielmo Maria Caporale, 74-107. Northampton, MA: Edward Edgar Publishing, Inc., 2024.
Berg, Florian, Andrew W. Lo, Roberto Rigobon, Manish Singh, and Ruixun Zhang. Portfolio Management Research Vol. 50, No. 8 (2024): 216-238.
The work tasks that AI is least likely to replace are those that depend on uniquely human capacities, such as empathy, judgment, ethics, and hope.
New MIT Sloan research offers a framework of human-intensive capabilities and a set of metrics to evaluate tasks across all occupations and better understand the effects of AI on the labor market.
Professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza co-authored a study examining the shift in jobs and tasks across the U.S. economy between 2016 and 2024. Rather than dispense with qualities like critical thinking and empathy, workplace technology heightened the need for workers who exhibit those attributes, Loaiza said.
A recent paper by professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza-Saa evaluated AI's effects on the U.S. labor force by focusing on humans' capabilities, rather than AI's. "We need to focus on what it is that humans can do so that we can complement machines," said Loaiza-Saa.
Different environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings can paint radically different pictures of the same company.
Companies that set SBTi targets, but didn't obtain assurance on their climate reports, performed no better on emissions reduction than non-SBTi.
This international economics program presents tools and frameworks to help executives understand and predict the medium- to long-run performance of economies in order to mitigate risk, develop growth plans, and make investment decisions, both locally and abroad. Participants will leave this macroeconomics course better able to make business decisions that take global markets and macroeconomics into account and how to interpret economic change in the context of their organization.
For many companies, the topic of sustainability is at the forefront of business agendas. Consumers and stakeholders are demanding greater accountability from organizations, and the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly stringent. However, pursuing the environmental, social, and governance impacts of business is often met with tension. Leaders now need to manage the misconception within business that meeting sustainability goals means compromising profits.
