Krishnamurthy Subramanian is Outstanding Choice As Chief Economic Adviser

Last Updated on January 19, 2019 by Bharat Saini

Dr. Krishnamurthy Subramanian, an expert on banking, corporate governance and economic policy, has assumed office of the new Chief Economic Advisor on Friday 7 December 2018 for a period of three years. He replaces Arvind Subramanian, who resigned from the post after a four-year stint on 20 June 2018. His term was supposed to end in May 2019 but he wanted to return to academic research in the US.

“The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved for the appointment of Dr Krishnamurthy Subramanian, Associate Professor and Executive Director (Centre for Analytical Finance) of Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, to the post of Chief Economic Adviser”, a government notification stated.

Krishnamurthy Subramanian, born in 1978 at Chennai in Tamil Nadu, is a very good singer and a polyglot, fluent in Bengali, English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu; a top-ranking IIT-Kanpur and IIM-Calcutta (1997-99) alumnus, a PhD from Chicago-Booth School of Business in 2005, has served on boards of Bandhan Bank, Reserve Bank of India Academy and National Institute of Bank Management; a member of the P.J. Nayak Committee on Governance of Bank Boards and SEBI committees on corporate governance, primary markets and secondary markets.

• Subramanian obtained his MBA and PhD in Financial Economics under the advice of Professor Luigi Zingales and Professor Raghuram Rajan, former RBI Governor.
• He served on the finance faculty at Goizueta Business School at Emory University in the United States.
• His research in banking, law and finance, innovation and economic growth, and corporate governance has been published in leading journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and the Journal of Law and Economics.
• He worked as a consultant with JPMorgan Chase in New York.
• He also served in a management role in the research group at ICICI Ltd.
• He was awarded ISB’s inaugural Alumni Endowment Research Fellow in 2014 for his exceptional work in shaping the banking sector and other path-breaking research with a significant societal impact.

Krishnamurthy Subramanian, affectionately called as ‘Subbu’ by his friends and colleagues, is an “outstanding choice for the job” of Chief Economic Advisor, according to those who have worked with him.

Subramanian is a recognised scholar and columnist for the Economic Times, Financial Express and Associate Editor of the Financial Management and Journal of Corporate Finance:

• In a paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in 2012, Subramanian with Viral Acharya (presently RBI Deputy Governor) argued that laws that protect employees against unjust dismissal spur innovation.
• “Stringent labour laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities”, he wrote with Acharya in another paper.
• Writing after demonetisation, he stated that the move would be “revolutionary in the annals of the country’s fight against corruption”, and argued that the data from the National Sample Survey Organisation showed that the impact of the note ban would not be as detrimental for the poor as was being portrayed by the opposition parties.
• Subramanian recently in 2018 wrote that to ward off a “witch hunt” against bankers, the Prevention of Corruption Act needs to be amended.