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Dr. Ramesh K.S. Rao
Dr. Ramesh K.S. Rao
Eugene and Margaret McDermott Professor of Finance, Department of Finance
Director, McCombs Wealth Management Center, University of Texas at Austin
- DBA., Indiana University
- MBA, Indiana University
- B Tech, Metallurgical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India
Ramesh K.S. Rao is the McDermott Centennial Professor of Banking and Finance at the McCombs School of Business. His research interests include asset pricing, informational asymmetry, and the interface between finance and both marketing and operations management.
Dr. Rao has published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and the Journal of Marketing, among others. He is the author of Financial Management: Concepts and Applications, 3rd ed., Fundamentals of Financial Management, and A Theory of the Firm’s Cost of Capital (with E. Stevens). His book (with V. Agrawal) titled Corporate Financial Decisions Under Informational Asymmetry is forthcoming in 2015. He has received the Outstanding Professor Award, the Joe Beasley Award, the Jack G. Taylor Teaching Excellence Award, Outstanding Professor Award in the Executive MBA Program, the Excellence in Education Award and the Regents Award at The University of Texas. He also served as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Director of the Texas MBA Program from 1997-1999. More recently, Dr. Rao was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
In addition to his academic background, Dr. Rao has had extensive consulting experience in the areas of bankruptcy, corporate restructuring, corporate valuation corporate litigation and executive education. He has testified as expert in, among others, American Express vs. Visa et al. , The State of Alaska v. Veco Corporation, and Boone v. CIGNA. He was appointed the sole valuation expert in the bankruptcy restructuring of First City Corporation. His clients include the Federal Home Loan Banks, Intel Corporation, Burlington Northern, Deutsche Bank and Fidelity Investments. He has served on the Boards of Directors of companies and has testified as an expert witness in the Federal Bankruptcy Courts. In addition to conducting seminars for IBM, Arthur Young, Chase Banks, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Phillips Petroleum, and Halliburton, Dr. Rao has participated in several executive development programs in the U.S. and abroad.
Sara Lundqvist, Ph.D.
Sara Lundqvist, Ph.D.
Sara Lundqvist is the Assistant Director of the Wealth Management Center at the McCombs School of Business. Sara did her master’s in Finance and her doctorate at Lund University in Sweden. She also did a postdoc at The University of Gothenburg in their Centre of Finance. In 2019, she started as a visiting researcher at the Department of Insurance, Risk, and Operations Management here at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focused on the implementation of enterprise risk management and was published in the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Accounting, Auditing, and Finance, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.
Sara now teaches the Property-Liability Risk Management and Planning course which is an elective for the Wealth Management Minor, as well as the Business Finance course required for all McCombs students. She also serves as the Finance Department’s Undergraduate Advisor. She is extremely passionate about strategic risk management which she sees as a fundamental purpose of wealth management –managing the risks that stand in the way of and those that must be taken in order to achieve any set objectives.
