Raghu Rau is the Sir Evelyn de Rothschild Professor of Finance at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He is also a founder and director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), as well as a member of the Cambridge Corporate Governance Network (CCGN).
Raghu Rau has taught at a number of universities around the world, including the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences PO), Paris-Dauphine, the University of Luxembourg, the Indian School of Business, Purdue University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of California at Berkeley. He was Principal at Barclays Global Investors, then the largest asset manager in the world, in San Francisco from 2008-2009.
His research interests include empirical corporate finance, information economics, behavioral finance, and game theory. His papers focus on why investors behave the way they do in real life. Raghu has investigated for example, behavioral biases that make investors value companies higher when the companies change their names, the effect of early-life natural disasters on CEO risk taking behavior, and why investors chase stale returns in mutual fund reported performance numbers. He has also published a book on corporate finance and several book chapters on behavioral finance.
Professor Rau is a former editor of Financial Management. He is also a past president of the European Finance Association. He serves on numerous academic editorial boards including journals such as the Journal of Corporate Finance, and the Journal of Banking and Finance. His research has frequently been covered by the popular press including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, among others.
In 2015, Raghu was awarded the Ig Nobel Management Prize for his paper “What doesn’t kill you will only make you more risk-loving: Early life disasters and CEO behavior”.
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> Professor of Finance Raghu Rau (Cambridge): ‘Bypassing banks using Tech’ [Video]