Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a much cited website on the global economy), a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers, and a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. He is also a member of the private sector systemic risk council founded and chaired by Sheila Bair in 2012.

Prof. Johnson is a Weekly Contributor to NYT.com's Economix, is a regular Bloomberg columnist, has a monthly article with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as Contributing Business Editor. Professor Johnson is the co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown, a bestselling assessment of the dangers now posed by the US financial sector (published March 2010) and White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You (April 2012).

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Prof. Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He is a Co-director of the NBER Africa Project, and works with non-profits and think tanks around the world. Johnson holds a BA in economics and politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in economics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in economics from MIT.