Dr. John E Parsons

Dr. John Parsons is a financial economist working in the area of corporate finance, valuation, capital investment and financial risk management. Focus is on the energy industry and on environmental problems, especially climate change. He has significant experience analyzing investments in the nuclear industry and is working on lecture notes on the economics of nuclear power.

Parsons is the Deputy Director for Research at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). His research focuses on the valuation and financing of investments in energy markets, as well as the problems of risk in energy and environment markets. Recent publications have touched on the value of changing the utilization of transmission to maximize the value of hydro assets and expanded penetration of renewables, the value of investments in life extensions of nuclear power plants, the economics of new microreactors, and the impact of decarbonization on generation assets in the U.S. midcontinent.

Dr. Parsons served as an Associate Member of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Dr. Parsons served as the Executive Director at both CEEPR and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and also as Head of Sloan’s MBA Finance Track. Before returning to MIT, Dr. Parsons spent ten years as a business consultant at Charles River Associates. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University and an A.B. from Princeton University.