Dr. Vikram Nanda

Nanda has published several scholarly articles in journals including The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. His work on multi-market trading received the best paper award at a market microstructure symposium sponsored by the Western Finance Association, Review of Financial Studies and the New York Stock Exchange. His articles at The Journal of Finance have been nominated twice for the Smith Breeden prize, and he has twice received research awards from the Q-Group for his work on hedge funds.


“I have an enduring faith in the role of well-functioning markets to allocate capital to its most productive use and, thereby, contribute to economic growth and development.”

Dr. Vikram Nanda joined the Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas in 2015. He previously held academic positions at Rutgers University, Georgia Tech, Arizona State University, The University of Michigan and The University of Southern California.

Nanda has broad research interests with a focus on corporate finance and financial institutions. His work seeks to explain the attributes and performance of financial institutions.

“I have an enduring faith in the role of well-functioning markets to allocate capital to its most productive use and, thereby, contribute to economic growth and development,” he said. “However, markets don’t function in the abstract; they need a strong legal system to ensure property rights and transparency.”

Nanda’s early work was on securities trading and external equity financing. He later worked on topics including financial innovation, distortions of incentive contracting, decision quality of powerful managers and the value and strategies of organizational forms, such as business groups and conglomerates.

His more recent research focused on financial institutions such as banks, mutual and hedge funds, and venture capital. He currently is working in behavioral finance to understand managerial “over-confidence” and its implications for incentive contracting, financing, shareholder lawsuits and the mitigating effect of rules. Other current research interests include information disclosure, trade secret laws and corruption.

Nanda has regularly served on the program committees for meetings of the Western Finance Association, the European Finance Association and the Financial Intermediation Research Society. He formerly served as associate editor for the Journal of Financial Research and for Financial Letters. He is the coauthor of a 2004 book on financial strategy, Finance for Strategic Decision-Making. He has also contributed articles to non-academic publications such as financial magazine Barron’s
Nanda earned a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an MBA from Yale University and a PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago.