‘Is It Over Yet?’ Economist to Discuss Financial Crisis in Yale Talk

The distinguished economist Raghuram G. Rajan will deliver the 2010 Arthur M. Okun Public Policy Lecture on March 25, at Yale’s Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall (SSS), 1 Prospect Street, Room 114, from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public, the talk is titled “Is It Over Yet? The Deeper Underpinnings of the Crisis.”

Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. He is also currently an economic advisor to the Prime Minister of India.

His major research focus is on economic growth, and the role finance plays in it.

“Raghuram Rajan is one of the great thinkers about the financial system and its instabilities. He in some ways anticipated the current financial crisis, and issued warnings before it happened. It will be most interesting to hear his assessment of the current state of our economy and possible future developments,” notes Robert Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale.

Between 2003 and 2006 Rajan served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He also has worked as a consultant for the Indian Finance Ministry, World Bank, Federal Reserve Board, Swedish Parliamentary Commission, and various financial institutions.

Rajan is co-author with Luigi Zingales, of the book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.” His research papers have appeared in a variety of publications and scholarly journals, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Financial Economics among them. His forthcoming book “Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy” will be published by Princeton University Press in June.

His work has earned him a number of awards. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003, which is awarded by the American Finance Association for the person under 40 who has contributed the most to the theory and practice of finance.

He is a director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and on the Comptroller General of the United States Advisory Council. He is the current vice president of the American Finance Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rajan earned his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1985 and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in 1987, and later moved to the United States, where he earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a thesis titled “Essays on Banking.”

He has been a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the MIT economics department and Sloan School of Management, as well as the Stockholm School of Economics.

The lecture series honors the memory of Arthur M. Okun (1928–1980), a long-time professor of economics at Yale who is best known for the widely accepted economic principle that bears his name. Okun’s Law holds that for every percentage point the unemployment rate falls, the Gross National Product increases by 3 percent. The lecture series seeks to recognize and encourage professional economists who search for policies that will contribute to the betterment of life and living.