Faculty
Kristin Forbes is the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She has regularly rotated between academia and senior policy positions. From 2014-2017 she was an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee for the Bank of England and from 2003 to 2005 she served as a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 2001-2002 Forbes was a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Treasury Department and over 2009-2014 she was a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers for the State of Massachusetts.
In 2019, Forbes was named an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She is currently the Convener of the Bellagio Group, a research associate at the NBER and CEPR, and a member of the US Monetary Policy Forum and Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves in a number of advisory positions, including for the Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund.
Forbes’ academic research addresses policy-related questions in international macroeconomics, including on monetary policy, macroprudential regulation, capital flows, exchange rates, inflation, and financial contagion. She has won numerous teaching awards and teaches one of the most popular classes at MIT's Sloan School. Before joining MIT, Forbes worked at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley.
She received her PhD in Economics from MIT and graduated summa cum laude (with highest honors) from Williams College.
Du, Wenxin, Kristin J. Forbes, and Matthew N. Luzzetti, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7159-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2024. NBER Working Paper 32321.
Kristin J. Forbes. In Economic Policy Symposium: Reassessing the Effectiveness and Transmission of Monetary Policy, Jackson Hole, WY: August 2024. Download Paper.
Forbes, Kristin J., Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose. VoxEU. CEPR, August 2024.
Forbes, Kristin J., Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7185-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, July 2024. Available on SSRN. CEPR Working Paper DP #19272.
Forbes, Kristin J. In Floating Exchange Rates at Fifty, edited by Doug Irwin and Maury Obstfeld, Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2024. Download Preprint.
Forbes, Kristin J. Financial Times, March 4, 2024.
New MIT Sloan research on patterns in interest rate cycles shows that the transition from hiking to cutting rates does not necessarily imply that interest rates will fall back to low levels.
Susan M. Collins discusses managing inflation and AI in finance.
"Central banks were slow to tighten, but they made up for that."
"All in all, there are a number of ways by which the bank could continue to refine and explore methods to communicate its policy decisions."
"How much unemployment or slowdown in growth should we be willing to accept to shorten the length of time that inflation is too high?"
"They'll have to go back to making it more symmetric of how they think about both inflation and unemployment."
