Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist, born on 3 February 1963, who has been the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business since 2016. He served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006 — at forty, the youngest person and the first born in an emerging-market nation to hold that post — as chief economic adviser to the Government of India from 2012 to 2013, and as the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, also becoming vice-chairman of the Bank for International Settlements in 2015. ^{1 2}

His early warnings of emerging risks in the global financial system, delivered three years before the 2008 financial crisis, received international scrutiny, and his books have made him one of the most cited economists of his generation. He is included here as a named contemporary of this group's subjects in the queue of modern figures. ¹

Rajan was born on 3 February 1963 in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. His father, R. Govindarajan, was an Indian Police Service officer posted abroad, and Rajan spent parts of his childhood in Indonesia and Sri Lanka — where political turmoil cost him a year of school — and in Belgium, before the family returned to India in 1974. He studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, took a postgraduate diploma in management at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and earned his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1991, with a thesis on banking. ¹

Rajan joined the Booth School of Business as an assistant professor of finance in 1991 and became a full professor in 1995; his research with Douglas Diamond on banks and with Luigi Zingales on institutions and growth is much cited. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and served as president of the American Finance Association in 2011. At the IMF he was brought in, after the Asian financial crisis, to strengthen the Fund's financial expertise. As governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 4 September 2013 to 4 September 2016 he oversaw Indian monetary policy under prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. ^{1 3}

With Luigi Zingales he wrote Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, on how free financial markets underpin economic modernisation. His Fault Lines (2010) examined the stresses — American income inequality, global trade imbalances and arm's-length finance — that produced the 2008 crisis, and won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His later books include I Do What I Do (2017) and The Third Pillar (2019). ¹

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