Raghavendra Rau, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge

Every Thursday a business school professor, an expert in his or her field, will define five key terms on FT Lexicon, our online economics, business and finance glossary.

Raghavendra Rau is the Sir Evelyn de Rothschild professor of finance at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD and an MSc from Insead, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and a BSc from the University of Delhi.

Professor Rau’s interests include corporate finance and market efficiency.

Before joining the University of Cambridge, Prof Rau taught at universities including the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Purdue University, the University of California at Los Angeles and most recently, the University of California at Berkeley.

He was named among the best teachers of the year at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and 2010. He has also won the Dean’s Outstanding MBA core course teaching award in 2005 and 2007 and the 2001 School of Management Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award at Purdue University. In 2008-2009, Prof Rau was principal at Barclays Global Investors, then the largest asset manager in the world, in San Francisco.

His papers, published in publications including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, have won awards including the EFA Barclays Global Investor Award, and the Chinese Finance Association Best Paper in Corporate Finance. He is currently an editor of Financial Management, and associate editor of the International Review of Finance and the Quarterly Journal of Finance.

The five terms defined by Raghavendra Rau on FT Lexicon this week are:

Staggered board

Performance-related pay

Relative performance evaluation (RPE)

CEO duality

GIM index

Compiled by Emmanuelle Smith

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