Joshua Rauh

Joshua Rauh specializes in empirical studies of corporate investment and financial structure, including applications to private equity and venture capital. He has also conducted extensive research on the financial structure of pension funds and their sponsors, and the measurement of public sector pension liabilities.

Joshua Rauh is a Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He formerly taught at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (2004–9) and the Kellogg School of Management (2009–12).

Professor Rauh studies corporate investment and financial structure, private equity and venture capital, and the financial structure of pension funds and their sponsors. He has published numerous journal articles and was awarded the 2006 Brattle Prize for the outstanding research paper on corporate finance published in the Journal of Finance for his paper “Investment and Financing Constraints: Evidence from the Funding of Corporate Pension Plans.”

In 2011 he won the Smith Breeden Prize for the outstanding research paper on capital markets published in the Journal of Finance, for his paper “Public Pension Promises: How Big Are They and What Are they Worth?” coauthored with Robert Novy-Marx. His other writings include “Earnings Manipulation, Pension Assumptions and Managerial Investment Decisions,” coauthored with Daniel Bergstresser and Mihir Desai, which won the Barclays Global Investor Best Symposium Paper from the European Finance Association and appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Other work has appeared in the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Finance.

Professor Rauh’s research on state and local pension systems in the United States has received national media coverage in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance and an editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance and the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. He holds a BA degree in economics, magna cum laude with distinction, from Yale University and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Awards and Honors

• Dhirubhai Ambani Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship, Stanford GSB, 2013-2014