Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program for The COVID-19 Pandemic: What Next? with MIT Sloan professor and co-chair of the COVID-19 Policy Alliance, Simon Johnson. This one-hour webinar will provide an update on public health in the United States and its implications for the economy. Johnson will also cover various plausible alternative scenarios for reopening the US economy, and will allow ample time for questions and answers.
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae.
Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.
His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S. through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support.
Johnson was previously a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors, and a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to early 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group.
“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research papers on long-term economic development, corporate finance, political economy, and public health are widely cited.
“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail”, Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013.
Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Engineering at MIT and Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, has argued in The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage (MIT Press, 2005) that a company’s survival and prosperity depend more on what it does before such a disruption occurs than on the actions it takes as the event unfolds. Ten years later, he published The Power of Resilience: How the Best Companies Manage the Unexpected (MIT Press, 2015). In this webinar, Professor Sheffi will focus on the here and now. He will explore the COVID-19 disruption in the context of past disruptions and explain what companies should be doing now as the epidemic is spreading.
His perspectives have been reported widely by WSJ, Bloomberg, CNBC, and all major media outlets, as well as trade publications. He is consulting with major corporations on understanding the supply chain impacts and the range of responses.