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Jonathan A. Parker

Jonathan A. Parker

· Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Finance

Active 1978–2025

h-index47
Citations19.8k
Papers22628 last 5y
Funding—

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About

Jonathan A. Parker is the Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management. He serves as a co-director of both the MIT Sloan Consumer Finance Initiative and the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy, and is the Area Head of Economics, Finance, and Accounting. His expertise encompasses finance, macroeconomics, and household behavior, with a focus on macroeconomic risks, asset returns, household financial decisions, fiscal stabilization policy, national saving, business cycle measurement, and modeling human economic behavior. His current research broadly addresses household finance, FinTech, financial markets, retirement financing, macroeconomics, and public policy. A significant part of his work involves documenting the role of liquidity in household spending decisions. His recent research topics include measuring household portfolios, risk-taking, beliefs, machine learning applications for household portfolios, the impact of household financial innovations on stock market dynamics, and analyzing the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and policy responses on Americans' living standards and small business owners. Parker has received recognition for his scholarly contributions, including the 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.

Research topics

  • Economics
  • Business
  • Computer Science
  • Finance
  • Microeconomics
  • Monetary economics
  • Mathematical economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Financial economics
  • Mathematics

Selected publications

  • Belief Disagreement and Portfolio Choice

    The Journal of Finance · 2022 · 181 citations

    ABSTRACT Using proprietary financial data on millions of households, we show that likely‐Republicans increased the equity share and market beta of their portfolios following the 2016 presidential election, while likely‐Democrats rebalanced into safe assets. We provide evidence that this behavior was driven by investors interpreting public information based on different models of the world. We use detailed controls to rule out the main nonbelief‐based channels such as income hedging needs, prefer…

    PublisherDOI

  • Asymmetric Consumption Smoothing

    American Economic Review · 2020 · 130 citations

    Senior authorCorresponding

    Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in other years, primarily by transferring funds among liquid accounts. Even households carrying credit card debt smooth consumption when making payments, and even highly liquid households spend out of refunds. This behavior is inconsistent with pur…

    PublisherDOI

  • Household Portfolios and Retirement Saving over the Life Cycle

    National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-03-01 · 35 citations

    reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

    US middle-class households invested 10% more of their investable wealth in the stock market in the past two decades than they did in the 1990s, and this share is now hump-shaped in age, declining after age 50. We present a range of evidence that the Pension Protection Act (PPA) — which allowed Target Date Funds (TDFs) as default options in retirement plans — played an important role. Younger (older) workers starting at the same firm after TDFs became the default option post-PPA, invested more (l…

    PublisherDOI

  • Household Portfolios and Retirement Saving Over the Life Cycle

    SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 16 citations

    articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
    PublisherDOI

  • Economic Impact Payments and Household Spending during the Pandemic

    Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2022-09-01 · 14 citations

    article1st authorCorresponding

    Households spent only a small fraction of their 2020 Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) within a month or two of arrival, consistent with pandemic constraints on spending, other pandemic programs and social insurance, and the broader disbursement of the EIPs compared to the economic losses during the early stages of the pandemic. While these EIPs did not fill an urgent economic need for most households, the first round of EIPs did provide timely pandemic insurance to some households that were more…

    PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

Awards & honors

  • 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly…

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