Richard Thakor

Biography

Richard T. Thakor is a Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is on leave from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, where he is an Associate Professor of Finance and also serves as the school's undergraduate Honors Program Coordinator. Thakor is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE), and is a Research Affiliate at the WFA Center for Finance and Accounting Research (WFA-CFAR) at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the Finance department at the University of Minnesota in 2016 after earning his PhD in Financial Economics from MIT. He also holds an M.S. in Management Research from MIT, an MSc in Finance and Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE), and a B.A. (summa cum laude) in Economics and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to earning his PhD, he worked in investment management as a Derivatives Trading Analyst.

Thakor does research in empirical and theoretical corporate finance, in the broad areas of R&D and innovation, financial institutions, and the effects of financial frictions on firm investments. An area of focus of his research agenda is healthcare finance, exploring how financial markets shape the drug development process as well as the delivery of healthcare to patients. He has published numerous research papers in leading journals in Finance, Economics, Management, and Healthcare, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Nature Biotechnology, and Health Affairs.

Thakor is a co-author (with Zvi Bodie and Robert C. Merton) of Principles of Finance, a textbook for introductory and follow-on Finance courses written for undergraduate and MBA audiences. He has taught courses at the undergraduate, MBA, Masters in Finance, PhD, and executive levels. He has won multiple teaching awards, including Minnesota Carlson Undergraduate Instructor of the Year and being named by Poets & Quants as one of the top 50 undergraduate business professors of 2024.