Dr. John E Parsons

John Parsons is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He teaches the finance elective Advanced Corporate Risk Management. He is the Executive Director of MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Head of the MBA Finance Track. Parsons is also a Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

He is a financial economist specializing in risk management, corporate finance and valuation. His research focuses on the problems of risk in energy and environment markets, the role of trading operations in energy companies, and the valuation and financing of investments in energy markets. For ten years Parsons worked in the finance practice at the economics consulting firm CRA International, where he was a vice president and principal. He worked with many major international oil companies, mining companies and commodity processors, electric utilities, and international pharmaceutical companies on a wide variety of risk management and valuation matters.

He has taught on the finance faculty at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the Zicklin School of Business at the City University of New York’s Baruch College and the Columbia Business School.

Parsons is a co-author of the blog “Betting the Business,” covering topics in financial risk management for non-financial companies.

He holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.