Raghavendra Rau

Raghavendra Rau holds the Sir Evelyn de Rothschild Professorship of Finance at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. He is the current Finance and Accounting subject group head at the school and a director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

Before joining the University of Cambridge, Rau was an academic in the US teaching at universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles and Purdue University. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Delhi University in 1987, an MBA from IIM Bangalore in 1989, and a Ph.D. degree from INSEAD in 1997. He is a past President of the European Finance Association and the program chair for the annual 40th anniversary meetings of the European Finance Association meetings in Cambridge.

He is known for his research on market efficiency. His most heavily cited papers have been a paper that showed how glamour acquirers (acquirers with a high market-to-book ratio) underperformed relative to value acquirers in the long-term after making an acquisition,[1] how firms that added a dotcom to the ends of their names during the 1999-2001 dotcom bubble experienced a surge in their stock prices,[2] and how firms in Hong Kong tunnel value away from their minority shareholders using related party transactions.[3]

He is a past editor of Financial Management,[4] and Associate Editor of the International Review of Finance and the Quarterly Journal of Finance. He won the Ig Nobel Prize in Management[5] in 2015 for his paper "What does not kill you will only make you risk-loving: Early-life disasters and CEO behavior".