Mark Aguiar

Mark Aguiar is the Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University.

Professor Aguiar received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999. He began his academic career at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business before moving to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2004 and then to the University of Rochester in 2006. He moved to Princeton in 2011.

Professor Aguiar’s research addresses issues in open- and closed-economy macroeconomics. Professor Aguiar has studied emerging market business cycles, sovereign debt, the political economy of capital taxation, and growth. His work on sovereign debt spans self-fulfilling debt crises, equilibrium maturity choice, and the costs and consequences of sovereign borrowing — the subject of his 2023 IMF Mundell-Fleming Lecture and his co-authored book, The Economics of Sovereign Debt and Default (Princeton University Press). His recent research extends to Pareto-improving fiscal and monetary policies, the theory of capital gains taxation, international risk sharing, and the macroeconomic effects of trade wars. He has also investigated life-cycle consumption, time allocation, inequality, and trends in labor supply, including work on young men’s labor supply and hand-to-mouth consumption behavior.

Professor Aguiar is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves as co-director of the NBER’s program on International Finance and Macroeconomics (IFM). He is also co-director of the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2026. Professor Aguiar was co-editor of the American Economic Review. He has previously served on the board of editors for the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Dynamics, and AEJ: Macroeconomics.