Rate My Professor Mert Demirer

Mert Demirer is the Ford Foundation International Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management within the Business & Economics faculty. His main academic specialty is industrial organization, focusing on developing innovative methods to analyze firm behavior, productivity, and market power. Additionally, he explores machine learning techniques for causal inference, integrating these tools into econometrics to uncover causal effects in economic studies. Demirer holds a PhD in Economics from MIT (2020), an MA in Economics from Koc University (2013), and a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University (2011).

Since 2021, Demirer has been at MIT Sloan, following a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research New England (2020-2021). He serves as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (since 2023), Visiting Faculty at the University of Chicago Economics Department (March-June 2026), and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (2024-2025). His research spans empirical industrial organization, firm productivity, firms' adoption of digital technologies, antitrust policy, and the productivity impacts of generative AI. Notable publications include "Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters" (The Econometrics Journal, 2018, with Victor Chernozhukov et al.), "Do Mergers and Acquisitions Improve Efficiency? Evidence from Power Plants" (Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming, with Ömer Karaduman), "The Effects of Generative AI on High-Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers" (Management Science, forthcoming, with Kevin Cui et al.), and "Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India" (Econometrica, 2025, with Victor Chernozhukov et al.).

Demirer has earned prestigious awards such as the MIT Robert M. Solow Prize for Excellence in Graduate Research and Teaching (2020), the Richard Stone Prize for “Estimating Global Bank Network Connectedness” (2020), MIT Sloan Junior Faculty Research Assistance Program Grants (2022, 2024, 2025), the Generative AI Impact Consortium Grant (2025), MIT GenAI Grant (2024), and the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Seed Award (2022). He co-organizes the NBER IO Summer Institute (2025) and serves on the EC Senior Program Committee (2026).