Sugato Chakravarty
Sugato Chakravarty is a visiting professor of management at Purdue University. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets. Sugato completed high school at St. Xavier's School in Calcutta. He graduated from Jadavpur University in Calcutta with a Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering before relocating to the United States for graduate studies. Chakravarty obtained a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kentucky, and his PhD in Finance from Indiana University. Career
Over his career, Dr. Chakravarty has taught and researched in interdisciplinary fields of psychology, marketing, finance and mathematics. His primary research areas include market microstructure, banking and asset pricing involving stock, options and fixed income securities, and spans both domestic and foreign markets. He is probably best known for his work on the decimalisation of stock prices, insider trading, and stealth trading. At Purdue, he is best known for teaching a Personal Finance course that teaches undergraduates the basic skills of money management, credit, insurance and retirement. The course also covers all popular and current topics and relates them back to the basic principles. The class is structured around a football cliché: "Offense wins games but defense wins championships." Professor Chakravarty argues that to win the game of life one needs to have solid offensive and defensive strategies. Investments (including those for retirement) is an offensive strategy while insurance is a defensive strategy. Credit plays the role of good special teams in that a judicious use of credit can move the line of scrimmage from one's 20-yard line to the 45 or 50 yard line and thereby makes it easier to score a personal finance touchdown. The class boasts enrollments of over 400 students every semester and is an elective in almost all majors across the West Lafayette campus. 