Rodney Ramcharan is a banking and corporate finance expert. Professor Ramcharan focuses on financial intermediation, monetary policy, and the connections between large financial institutions and the U.S. economy. He researches bank lending, the economic impact of bank branching deregulation, how banks respond to distress, and why they fail.
Between 2012 and 2015, Professor Ramcharan served as the first chief of the Systemic Financial Institutions and Markets section at the Federal Reserve Board. In that role, he contributed to U.S. regulatory policy discussions and issues involving the Basel Regulatory Framework. Professor Ramcharan also worked as a senior economist in the Federal Reserve’s Financial Studies Section. Previously, he worked for nearly a decade as an economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), specializing in exchange rate matters and monetary policy in emerging markets and developing economies.
Professor Ramcharan researches a range of banking and regulatory policy topics. His recent work examines competition effects in consumer credit markets, as well as how relative income affects household consumption and financial decisions. In his earlier research, Professor Ramcharan analyzed loan applications from a peer-to-peer internet bank to determine how home price fluctuations affected borrowing conditions outside the mortgage market. In 2019, he received the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence from the USC Marshall School.
Professor Ramcharan publishes articles in leading financial and economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, Management Science, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He has received several best paper honors, including the Community Banking Research Conference’s award for the paper with the most significant contribution to banking policy. Bloomberg, the New York Times, NPR’s “Marketplace,” and the Wall Street Journal have cited his research.
At the USC Marshall School, Professor Ramcharan is executive director of the U.S. Census Research Data Center, which analyzes nonpublic federal statistical microdata. He has been a visiting scholar at the Dutch National Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and consulted to the Swedish Riksbank.
