Deborah J. Lucas

Faculty

Deborah J. Lucas

Support Staff

Title

About

Academic Groups

Academic Area

Centers & Initiatives

Deborah Lucas is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

Lucas’s current research lies at the intersection of finance and policy, with a focus on economically meaningful cost measurement and assessment of government financial activities. Some current projects include developing and applying improved models to measure credit subsidies to state-owned enterprises, evaluating the international fiscal and macroeconomic implications of COVID-19 credit support and forbearance programs, creating a world atlas of government financial institutions, and analyzing the costs and welfare consequences of government financial products such as reverse mortgages.

 Lucas is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Term Professor at the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University, and a member of the Shadow Open Market Committee. She serves on an advisory board at the Urban Institute and at the Peterson Institute, and is on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Financial Economics. She is a board member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and P/E Investments, and a consultant for the Congressional Budget Office. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Previous appointments include chief economist, and subsequently assistant and associate director at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, member of the Social Security Technical Advisory Panel, senior staff economist for U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and coeditor of the JMCB. An expert on federal credit programs, she has testified before the U.S. Congress on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, student loans, and strategically important financial institutions.

Lucas received her BA, MA, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

Publications

"A Fair Value Approach to Valuing Public Infrastructure Projects and the Risk Transfer in Public Private Partnerships."

Lucas, Deborah J., and Jorge Jimenez Montesinos. In Economics of Infrastructure Investment, 1-33. Cambridge, MA: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming.

"COVID Credit Policies Around the World: Size, Scope, Costs and Consequences."

Gee Hee Hong and Deborah J. Lucas. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring Conference, Washington, D.C.: March 2023.

"Credit Risk Transfer and the Pricing of Mortgage Default Risk."

Golding, Edward, and Deborah J. Lucas, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6380-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2022.

"Comment on ‘Measuring U.S. Fiscal Capacity using Discounted Cash Flow Analysis'."

Lucas, Deborah J. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2022.

"Chapter 10: Policy Rx for the Economy: Cash or Credit?"

Lucas, Deborah J. In Impact of COVID-19 on Asian Economies and Policy Responses, edited by Bernard Yeung, Sumit Agarwal, and Zhiguo He, 65-69. London, UK: World Scientific Press, 2021.

Load More

Recent Insights

Press

MIT’s Golub Center presents the Miriam Pozen Prize to Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank

The biennial prize recognizes an individual who had made outstanding contributions to the advancement of financial policy research or practice, which is the core mission of the MIT GCFP.

Read Article
Ideas Made to Matter

After SVB, what’s next for regional banks? 3 takeaways from MIT Sloan

Four MIT Sloan economists on lessons learned and next steps after the demise of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic.

Read Article
Load More

Media Highlights

Load More