Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Rajan at the World Economic Outlook press conference, Washington DC, IMF Headquarters
Born	(1963-02-03) 3 February 1963 Bhopal, India
Nationality	Indian
Academic career
Field	Financial economics
Institution	University of Chicago
Alma mater	IIT-Delhi (B.Tech.) IIM Ahmedabad (M.B.A.) MIT (Ph.D.)
Awards	2003 Fischer Black Prize,the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2010.
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Raghuram Govind Rajan (Tamil : ரகுராம் கோவிந்த் ராஜன்)(born 3 February 1963) is currently the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He is also an honorary economic adviser to Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh (appointed 2008.) and the current President of the American Finance Association. He previously was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and headed a committee appointed by the Planning Commission on financial reforms in India.

Rajan is also a visiting professor a for the Indian Finance Ministry, World Bank, Federal Reserve Board, and Swedish Parliamentary Commission.

Early life

Raghuram Rajan was born in Bhopal. In 1985, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering; he completed the Master of Business Administration at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1987. He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991 with a thesis entitled "Essays on Banking."

Career

After graduation, Rajan joined the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

He was the "Economic Counselor and Director of Research" (Chief Economist) at the International Monetary Fund from September 2003 until January 2007. In 2003, he was also the inaugural recipient of the Fischer Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association for contributions to the theory and practice of finance by an economist under age 40.

In 2005, at a celebration honoring Alan Greenspan, who was about to retire as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Rajan delivered a controversial paper that was critical of the financial sector. In that paper, "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?", Rajan "argued that disaster might loom." Rajan argued that financial sector managers were encouraged to

(take) risks that generate severe adverse consequences with small probability but, in return, offer generous compensation the rest of the time. These risks are known as tail risks.[...] But perhaps the most important concern is whether banks will be able to provide liquidity to financial markets so that if the tail risk does materialize, financial positions can be unwound and losses allocated so that the consequences to the real economy are minimized.

Thus Rajan described the 2007-2008 collapse of the world's financial system.

The response to Rajan's paper at the time was negative. For example, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the warnings “misguided.”

In April 2009, Rajan penned a guest column for The Economist, in which he proposed a regulatory system that might minimize boom-bust financial cycles.

In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In a poll in The Economist, Rajan ranked first as the economist with the most important ideas in the post-financial crisis world.

Publications

• Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, was co-authored with fellow Chicago Booth professor Luigi Zingales and published in 2004.
• Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, published in 2010, has won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2010.

• He has also published numerous articles in top-tier finance and economics journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance and Oxford Review of Economic Policy.