Meet Raman Uppal, a finance Professor who challenges certainties to advance knowledge

Born in Delhi, Raman grew up in a business-oriented household where decisions were a constant topic at the dinner table. That early exposure to strategic thinking led him to study economics at St. Stephen’s College — India’s most prestigious institution for the discipline, a decision that would eventually propel him far beyond his home country.

But it wasn’t only academic curiosity that shaped his next steps. A few years later, while mountaineering with friends who had gone on to pursue their PhDs at the University of Pennsylvania, one of them remarked that the program was more challenging than climbing itself. That offhand comment became a turning point.

Raman applied and was admitted to the Wharton School (UPenn), where he earned an MA, an MBA, and a PhD in Finance, which he completed in 1989 with "Three Essays in International Finance", his thesis.

There, a serendipitous case of mistaken identity by his PhD advisor — who assumed he had an engineering background — forced Raman to delve deep into mathematics. “He thought I already knew all the math he was using,” he recalls with a smile. “So I had to teach myself everything he assumed I knew. That made me more mathematical than most finance researchers.” In hindsight, this unintended rigor became a foundation for much of his distinctive work.

His first academic appointment took him to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, which he joined in 1988. “I interviewed on a sunny day,” he says, laughing. “That’s rare in Vancouver, and I think the stars were aligned.” The stunning scenery aside, UBC had one of the strongest finance departments in the world at the time. “It was a collegial place where I learned how to truly do research,” he says. “A PhD teaches you concepts, but not how to publish high-quality research.”

At UBC, he specialized in international finance — his first research area, shaped by his doctoral work. Collaborating with fellow finance academic Piet Sercu, who happened to be living in the same housing complex on campus, the two co-authored the widely used textbook International Financial Markets and the Firm, and the research monograph Exchange Rate Volatility, Trade and Capital Flows, which won the prestigious Sanwa Monograph Award in 1995.

By the late 1990s, Raman had followed his wife to the MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then to London, eventually joining London Business School (LBS) in 2000. In London, he noticed that few academics were interested in international finance. “Everyone was focused on capital markets,” he explains. So he pivoted—turning his attention to asset pricing and, more specifically, how people make financial decisions under uncertainty.

Drawing from the groundbreaking ideas of Nobel laureates Lars Hansen and Thomas Sargent, he began exploring how uncertainty—not just risk—shapes investment behavior. “Unlike risk, which you can model with probabilities, uncertainty cannot be modeled by probability distributions,” he says.

This research led him to investigate portfolio models for an uncertain world. One of his most cited papers published in 2009 (1) revealed a striking paradox: that naïve portfolio strategies — simply dividing your investment equally across the available assets — outperformed sophisticated models, including the Nobel-Prize-winning model of Markowitz. The finding unsettled decades of finance theory. His corrective framework set a new standard for how financial models are validated, earning over 4,500 citations and influencing both academia and practice.

In 2011, Professor Uppal joined EDHEC Business School, drawn by its research-first culture and the flexibility to concentrate on his academic work. Still, he hasn’t shied away from leadership when needed — serving, for instance, as academic head of EDHEC’s PhD program in Finance.

At EDHEC, he has continued to evolve. His current research revolves around three essential questions: Why do people invest the way they do? How should they invest? And what are the consequences of these investment decisions for markets and the economy?

These questions span household finance, behavioral finance, and general equilibrium models. This research has been published in American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of International Money and Finance, and Management Science (2) .

He also teaches three courses — two MSc electives, in Quantitative Portfolio Management and Decentralized Finance, and a PhD seminar in Capital Markets. “I’ve always enjoyed teaching,” he says. “It’s about communication. You can’t do good research without being able to explain it.”

Raman’s curiosity remains undiminished. A few years ago, he realized he needed to understand blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies — topics gaining traction in the financial world. “Every year I said I’d want to learn about it, but postponed it,” he admits. So he committed to teaching a course, forcing himself to dive in.

With help from his wife — who enrolled in several online classes to learn what little was known about this new topic — and countless hours reading whitepapers and research articles, Raman developed a curriculum that’s now a fixture of EDHEC’s MSc offerings. He saw in blockchain a centuries-old objective: “It’s a modern way of solving a very old problem—how to build trust between people to enable exchange.”

Throughout his career, Professor Uppal has accumulated an impressive list of accolades for both research and teaching, including multiple prizes at EDHEC, LBS, and UBC. He has held permanent and visiting positions at prestigious universities and has served as the co-Director of the Financial Economics Program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

But for him, the real prize is something quieter: the freedom to think, to learn, and to share knowledge with others. Whether working with PhD students, researching financial models, or breaking down complex concepts for MSc learners, Raman remains grounded in the same curiosity that once drew him from the foothills of the Himalayas to the halls of Wharton. “I don’t believe in intellectual silos,” he says. “Finance is part mathematics, part psychology, part economics. And I like standing at those intersections.”

Key Dates

Since 2011: Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School (France)

2009–2010 and 2021–2022: Visiting Professor, London School of Economics (UK)

2002-2005: Co-Director of the Financial Economics Programme of CEPR (Center for Economic Policy Research), London

2002–2010: Professor of Finance, London Business School (UK)

2000–2002: Associate Professor (with tenure), London Business School (UK)

1997–2000: Visiting Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge (USA)

1995–2000: Associate Professor (with tenure), University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada)

1995-1996: Visiting Professor of Finance, Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)

1992-1995: B.I. Ghert Family Foundation Junior Professor, UBC

1988–1992: Assistant Professor, UBC

1989: Ph.D. in Finance, The Wharton School

1988: MBA, The Wharton School

1986: MA in Finance, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

1983: BA (Honours) in Economics, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University (India)

To know more about Raman Uppal

• See his webpage on edhec.edu
• Visit his personal webpage
• Browse his Google Scholar webpage

References

(1) Victor DeMiguel, Lorenzo Garlappi, Raman Uppal, Optimal Versus Naive Diversification: How Inefficient is the 1/N Portfolio Strategy?, The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 22, Issue 5, May 2009, Pages 1915–1953, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhm075

(2) See Pr. Uppal's Google scholar profile which gathers more than 100 academic articles - https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ebG0uh0AAAAJ