Simon Johnson is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of a website on the global economic and financial crisis, BaselineScenario.com. He is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research project on Africa and President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (term of office 2008-09).

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Professor Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. In 2000-2001 Professor Johnson was a member of the US Securities and Exchange Commissions Advisory Committee on Market Information. Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, over the past 20 years he has worked on crisis prevention, amelioration, and recovery around the world, in both relatively rich and relatively poor countries.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and Cliometrica (a new Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History). Johnson earned his B.A. from the University of Oxford, his M.A. from the University of Manchester, and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.