Raghuram Rajan Indian economist Date of Birth: 03.02.1963 Country: India

Biography of Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Govinda Rajan, the current 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, was born on February 3, 1963, in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. He comes from an academic family, with his father being a government official in India. Rajan attended Delhi Public School, RK Puram and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) in 1985. He then pursued a Master of Business Administration degree from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) in 1987. Rajan's dissertation titled 'Essays on Banking' earned him a Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991.

After completing his extensive education, Rajan joined the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He served as the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from October 2003 to December 2006. In 2003, Rajan co-authored the book 'Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists' with Luigi Zingales. He also wrote the book 'Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy', which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2010.

Rajan is a member of various prestigious organizations, including the Group of Thirty, an international organization of leading financiers and economists. He served as the President of the American Finance Association in 2011 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In November 2008, Rajan was appointed as the Honorary Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. In the same year, he chaired the High-Level Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, which presented its final report to the Planning Commission. In May 2012, Rajan wrote about the causes of the economic crisis in the United States and Europe between 2008 and 2012. He highlighted the issue of labor competitiveness in the era of globalization and the reliance on easy credit as factors contributing to the crisis. Rajan suggested that industrialized countries should focus on stimulating production and competitiveness instead of trying to return to artificially inflated GDP figures.

Raghuram Rajan is married to Radhika Puri, his classmate from IIM-A. Puri is a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. The couple has a son and a daughter.