Simon Johnson (economist)

Simon H. Johnson (born January 16, 1963) is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including Professor of Economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.

He is author, with James Kwak, of the 2010 book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (ISBN 978-0307379054), with whom he has also co-founded and regularly contributes to the economics blog The Baseline Scenario.

Johnson's first degree was a BA from the University of Oxford, which was followed by an MA from the University of Manchester, and finally in 1989 he earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, with a dissertation entitled Inflation, intermediation, and economic activity.

Among other positions he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). He is also a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. From 2006 to 2007 he was a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is currently a senior fellow. He is on the editorial board of four academic economics journals. He has contributed to Project Syndicate since 2007.