Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson is Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management and a 2024 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (shared with Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson). He co-authored the landmark paper "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development" (2001) with Acemoglu and Robinson, which used the mortality rates of colonial settlers as an instrument to identify the causal effect of institutions on long-run economic development. This work became one of the most cited papers in economics. Johnson served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2008, directly engaged in crisis management during the onset of the global financial crisis. After the crisis, he co-founded the economics blog "The Baseline Scenario" and wrote "13 Bankers" (with James Kwak), a critical analysis of how large financial institutions gained excessive influence over U.S. economic policy — a view he developed during his IMF tenure observing how financial crises unfold and how the financial sector interacts with political power.