About

Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Visiting Professor at IESA in Venezuela. Rigobon is a macroeconomist who concentrates on measurement issues related to economic, social, and ethical dimensions. His research includes studying financial contagion and the propagation of shocks through economic networks. He is a founding member of the Billion Prices Project, which produces alternative measures of inflation in many countries, and a cofounder and director of the Aggregate Confusion Project, which aims to improve ESG measurement. Since joining MIT Sloan in 1997, Rigobon has been recognized multiple times for his teaching excellence, receiving the Teacher of the Year award five times and three Excellence in Teaching awards. His academic background includes a PhD in Economics from MIT, an MBA from IESA in Venezuela, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Economics
• Business
• Computer Science
• Econometrics
• Accounting
• Financial economics
• Geography
• Finance
• Linguistics
• Biology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• The Limits of AI in Financial Services

  ArXiv.org · 2025-03-27

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  AI is transforming industries, raising concerns about job displacement and decision making reliability. AI, as a universal approximation function, excels in data driven tasks but struggles with small datasets, subjective probabilities, and contexts requiring human judgment, relationships, and ethics.The EPOCH framework highlights five irreplaceable human capabilities: Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity, and Hope. These attributes are vital in financial services for trust, inclusion, innovation, and consumer experience. Although AI improves efficiency in risk management and compliance, it will not eliminate jobs but redefine them, similar to how ATMs reshaped bank tellers' roles. The challenge is ensuring professionals adapt, leveraging AI's strengths while preserving essential human capabilities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corporate Omissions: Correcting the Bias in Carbon Reporting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring by Executive Order

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• From Wealth to Welfare: Systemic Complementarities for the Age of AI

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Limits of AI in Financial Services

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Democratic Paradox in Large Language Models' Underestimation of Press Freedom

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Timing Sustainable Engagement in Real Asset Investments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Quantifying the Returns of ESG Investing: An Empirical Analysis with Six ESG Metrics

  The Journal of Portfolio Management · 2024-06-30 · 9 citations

  article

  Within the contemporary context of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing principles, the authors explore the risk–reward characteristics of portfolios in the United States, Europe, and Japan constructed using the foundational tenets of Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory with data from six major ESG rating agencies. They document statistically significant excess returns in ESG portfolios from 2014 to 2020 in the United States and Japan. They propose several statistical and voting-based methods to aggregate individual ESG ratings, the latter based on the theory of social choice. They find that aggregating individual ESG ratings improves portfolio performance. In addition, the authors find that a portfolio based on Treynor–Black weights further improves the performance of ESG portfolios. Overall, these results suggest that significant signals in ESG rating scores can enhance portfolio construction despite their noisy nature.

  PublisherDOI

• The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Timing Sustainable Engagement in Real Asset Investments

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-07-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  This paper estimates the effect of sustainable shareholder engagement on firm's investments.We study the real estate industry where investments are sporadic and occur following depreciation cycles.SEC restrictions (rule 240.14a-8) on shareholder proposals, in combination with the asset depreciation cycles, create random variation enabling us to identify firms' sustainable investment decisions.Using unique micro-data tracking investments in all public US commercial real estate properties over the past two decades, we find that sustainable engagement effectively steers firms to initiate tangible and long-lasting sustainable retrofits.However, engagement is ineffective or impairs such investments when it does not coincide with reinvestment periods, or investors vote down the proposal.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alberto Cavallo

  90 shared

• Anna Pavlova

  Centre for Economic Policy Research

  44 shared

• Fernando Borráz

  Universidad de Montevideo

  31 shared

• Leandro Zipitría

  Universidad de la República

  29 shared

• Brian Sack

  27 shared

• Eduardo A. Cavallo

  24 shared

• Brent Neiman

  Center for Economic and Policy Research

  19 shared

• Ugo Panizza

  17 shared

Awards & honors

• Best Paper Award from the Miami University Finance and Real…
• Financial Times Responsible Business Awards recognition (202…
• Pagano and Zechner Prize for the best non-investment paper p…
• 2022 Allocators’ Choice Award for Partnership of the Year fr…
• 2020 GRASFI Best Paper Prize from the Global Research Allian…