Meet Raghuram Rajan, a Rockstar Economist and new Governor of RBI

Dr. Raghuram Rajan is the new Governor of Reserve Bank of India succeeding D Subbarao. He is an alumnus of IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known as an Economist with an Rockstar appeal and is among the Top 10 Economists of the World. He was one of the First economists to predict the 2008 Recession.

Born on February 3 1963 at Bhopal India, Raghuram natively belongs to Tamil Nadu.His Father was a Senior Bureaucrat in Indian Government. He did Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi, MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and PhD from MIT. He was Gold Medalist both at IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad. He is married to Radhika Rajan.

During early days of his career he worked at Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Later he was appointed Chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He also served as the president of the American Finance Association. Last year he was appointed as Chief Economic Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. On September 4 he would take over as the next Governor of Reserve Bank of India.

He also serves as Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Rajan is also a visiting professor for the World Bank, Federal Reserve Board, and Swedish Parliamentary Commission.

Awards

Raghuram Rajan has received several awards in past. He was 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 a 2011 poll in The Economist,  Dr. Raghuram Rajan was ranked by his peers as the economist with “the most important ideas for a post-crisis world”. He was also awarded with Infosys Science Foundation award in the same year.

In 2013, the Center for Financial Studies (CFS) has awarded the 5th Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics to Raghuram G. Rajan for his highly influential contributions in a remarkably broad range of areas in financial economics

Publications

Rajan has a highly acclaimed track of work record. He published Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,along with Chicago Booth professor Luigi Zingales in 2004.

In 2010, he published Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2010.

In 2012, he published The True Lessons of the Recession; The West Can’t Borrow and Spend Its Way to Recovery.

Controversies

In 2005 he predicted an upcoming recession when he  delivered his controversial paper, Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?”, at US Federal Reserve.  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. He was heavily criticized for this. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers called his warnings as misguided and Rajan a luddite. But after 2008,  even The Wall Street Journal accepted his ideas.

In 2009, he made an Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job which earned him more global acclamation and fanfare.

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