Ricardo Caballero, the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT, has been named the 2026 winner of the prestigious King of Spain Prize in Economics in recognition of his influential work in macroeconomics, finance, and international economics.
Caballero, who joined the MIT faculty in 1992 and was previously a professor at Columbia University, has been a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He is honored for his research focusing on financial crises, international capital flows, safe assets, global imbalances, monetary policy, and the interactions between financial markets and the real economy. His most significant contributions include the theory of the global shortage of safe assets, the analysis of global imbalances and persistently low interest rates, and the development of risk-centric macroeconomics, a framework for understanding financial crises, recessions, and episodes of macroeconomic instability.
Caballero has received a number of other notable professional honors, including the Econometric Society's Frisch Medal (2002) and the Banque de France–Toulouse School of Economics Senior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance (2022). He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The King of Spain Prize, now in its 40th year, was created by the José Celma Prieto Foundation and is awarded biennially to a distinguished economist from Spain or Latin America.