Dr. Viral V. Acharya

Viral was a Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India during 23rd January 2017 to 23rd July 2019 in charge of Monetary Policy, Financial Markets, Financial Stability, and Research. He was the Director of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India and the NYU-Stern Initiative on the Study of Indian Capital Markets, a Director of Western Finance Association, and a member of the Economic Advisory Committee of the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FINRA), International Advisory Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Advisory Council of the Bombay (Mumbai) Stock Exchange (BSE) Training Institute, and Academic Research Council Member of the Center for Advanced Financial Research And Learning (CAFRAL, India). He has also been an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia and the Board of Governors. In addition, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Corporate Finance, a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).

Viral completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001. Prior to joining Stern, he was at London Business School (2001-2008), the Academic Director of the Coller Institute of Private Equity at LBS (2007-09) and a Senior Houblon-Normal Research Fellow at the Bank of England (Summer 2008).

Viral’s primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation and its genesis in government-induced distortions, an inquiry that cuts across several other strands of research – credit risk and liquidity risk, their interactions and agency-theoretic foundations, as well as their general equilibrium consequences. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Financial Analysts Journal. He is currently associate editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies (RCFS, 2011-) and Review of Finance (2006-), and was an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2009-12) and associate editor of the Journal of Finance (2011-14). He is the recipient of several Best Paper Awards by leading global finance institutions, academic journals and conferences.

At Stern, Viral co-edited the books Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System, John Wiley & Sons, March 2009, Regulating Wall Street: The Dodd-Frank Act and the New Architecture of Global Finance, John Wiley & Sons, November 2010, and Dodd-Frank: One Year On, NYU-Stern and CEPR (released on voxeu.org), July 2011. He is also the co-author of the book Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance, Princeton University Press, March 2011 and Harper Collins (India), June 2011.