Jonathan E. Payne
Jonathan Payne is an assistant professor of economics in Princeton's Department of Economics. His research has four main threads. One studies the introduction of banking frictions into macroeconomic models, including work on how covenants to long-term bank-firm loans allowed banks to disrupt credit during the 2007-9 financial crisis and how deposit contracts could be redesigned to avoid future bank runs. A second thread studies 19th-century US financial history, estimating the yield curve on US debt from 1800 to 2020 and testing the impact of bank regulation following the Civil War. The third thread develops new tools for solving macroeconomic models with financial frictions, using neural networks to solve continuous-time, non-linear heterogeneous agent models. A final thread studies the future of the financial sector including the role of digital currencies and the potential opportunities for green finance. Payne earned his Ph.D. from New York University and he joined the Princeton faculty in 2020 after spending a year as a Pyewacket Fellow at the Bendheim Center for Finance. Payne currently teaches the undergraduate/master's course on FinTech and the first-year Ph.D. course in macroeconomics. He also runs student reading groups on macrofinance and green finance.