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. Her research, which lies at the intersection of finance and policy, employs the insights of financial economics to more fully measure the costs and risks of a broad range of government financial activities, from bank bailouts to the social cost of carbon. That work is motivated by the belief that better measurement will lead to better decisions by both policymakers and the members of the public. While finance and policy is her vocation, her passion is appreciation and preservation of the natural world, and she is thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to the unique mission of NatureServe.
Currently she is spending a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund where she is working on an inventory of government financial subsidies to the energy sector. Other current affiliations include: Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, member of the Academic Research Council of the Housing Policy Center at the Urban Institute, member of the Shadow Open Market Committee, and trustee for the NBER pension plans. She is on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and serves as an independent director of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and P/E Investments. Elected positions include: member of the National Academy of Public Administration, member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, Senior Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research, and Fellow of the Econometric Society. Previous appointments include: chief economist, and subsequently assistant and associate director at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, senior staff economist for U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, and Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She received her BA, MA, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
