Professor Karthik Ramanna
About
Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. An expert on business-government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting and auditing, Professor Ramanna studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders.
He has authored dozens of research articles and case studies on leadership and public-policy issues in Africa, Canada, China, Europe, India, Japan, Latin America, and the US, and he has consulted with several leading commercial and public organizations worldwide. His scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics Best Paper Prize and three times the international Case Centre’s prizes for outstanding case-writing, dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.” In 2022, he won the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award for “groundbreaking management thinking” for joint work on rigorous climate accounting.
Professor Ramanna is director of Oxford’s Master in Public Policy program, a flagship one-year degree for current and prospective leaders in government. He is founder and faculty chair of the Transformational Leadership Fellowship, a bespoke, by-invitation program for senior leaders looking to reimagine their public-service impact. He also founded and directs Oxford’s Case Centre for Public Leadership, and he is fellow and member of the finance and investment committees at St. John’s College.
Previously, Professor Ramanna taught leadership, corporate governance, and accounting at the Harvard Business School in both the MBA and senior executive-education programs. He has a doctorate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Accounting, Economics & Law.
He lives in Oxford with his husband, Jon, and they enjoy dinner parties and touring Caravaggios.
Expertise
- Corporate governance, corporate finance, accounting and auditing
- Capitalism, globalisation, economics
- Business leadership
- Financial regulation, public financial management
- Brexit
- Global public policy, political economies
- Corruption and ethics
- Master of Public Policy and MBA programmes, business school rankings
Selected publications
- “Managing in the Age of Outrage”, SSRN Working Paper (2022)
- “Accounting for Climate Change”, Harvard Business Review (winner of the HBR-McKinsey prize, 2022)
- “Friedman at 50: Is it Still the Social Responsibility of Business to Increase Profits?” California Management Review (2020)
- “Should America Still Believe in Free Markets?”, The American Interest (2020)
- “Building a Culture of Challenge in Audit Firms”, PwC Future of Audit Initiative (2019)
- “Thin Political Markets: The Soft Underbelly of Capitalism”, California Management Review (2015)
- “The International Politics of IFRS Harmonization”, Accounting, Economics and Law - A Convivium (2013)
Media experience
Professor Karthik Ramanna has experience working with the media both in print and broadcast (e.g. BBC Radio 4, Renegade Inc.) including providing comment for national newspapers such as the Financial Times on a regular basis and authoring opinion pieces for the Daily Telegraph.
Recent media work
- Trump school of government: teaching policy in an era of political dysfunction (Times Higher Education, 2020)
- The Big Four and the revolving door (Renegade Inc, 2018)
- Wake Up to Money: Slow speed for online retail growth (BBC Radio 5 Live, 2018)
- Big four UK accountancy firms face radical shake-up (Financial Times, 2018)