About Us

Summary

Rajeev R. Bhattacharya, Ph.D. has three decades’ research, consulting, management, and teaching experience in finance, economics, and Big Data. He is the president of Washington Finance and Economics and has worked in senior roles at leading consulting firms including the Berkeley Research Group. He has served on the full-time faculty of the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Washington University in St. Louis, and University of New South Wales, and on the part-time faculty of Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, and George Washington University. He teaches financial economics, capital markets, and derivatives. 

Rajeev’s primary expertise is in the application of the frontiers of quantitative methods to stocks, bonds, and derivatives, especially with event studies. He has recently presented his original research at twelve academic seminars at leading institutions and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, using high-frequency intraday equity, and fixed income securities, and derivatives data, consisting of hundreds of trillions of observations, over 25 TB of data.

“Impact of Self-Regulation on Quality of Financial Markets,” with Mahendra Gupta, 2025 (forthcoming), Journal of Accounting Literature, also the leading article in the “Academic Articles” section of the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse (https://securities.stanford.edu/resources-academic.html), finds that FINRA 2241's impact on each of ten systematic and objective market quality metrics was insignificant.

His book, Advanced Analytics for Finance: Theory and Empirics Using Big Data, forthcoming later this year with Cambridge University Press, has the foreword by Raghu Sundaram (Senior Vice-Chancellor, Dean Emeritus, and Edward I. Altman Professor of Credit and Debt Markets, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University) and strong endorsements from leading scholars and practitioners, including Tom Smith (Professor of Finance, Department of Applied Finance, Macquarie University), Mahendra Gupta (Former Dean and Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professor of Accounting and Management, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis), Nagpurnanand Prabhala (Francis J. Carey, Jr. Professor, Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University), Daniel Taylor (Arthur Andersen Professor, Director, Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), Anjan Thakor (John E. Simon Professor of Finance and Director of the WFA Center for Finance and Accounting Research, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis), Jeffrey Pontiff (Professor and James F. Cleary ’50, DBA H ’93 Chair in Finance, Carroll School of Management, Boston College), Markos Zachariadis (Chair in Financial Technology & Information Systems, Alliance Manchester Business School, Founding Director, Centre for Financial Technology Studies, University of Manchester), Glenn MacDonald (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis), Sanjiv Sabherwal (Eunice and James L. West Endowed Chair and Chair of the Department of Finance and Real Estate, College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington), Graciela Chichilnisky (Professor of Economics and Statistics, Columbia University), Kien Tran (Professor of Econometrics, University of Lethbridge), Vivek Pandey (Professor of Finance, University of Texas at Tyler), Hamid Yahyaei (Specialized Lecturer in Applied Finance, Macquarie University), Prasanta Bandyopadhyay(Professor of Philosophy, Montana State University), Dilip Ratha(Head of KNOMAD, Lead Economist, Migration, and Remittances, World Bank), Joseph Bial (Partner, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison), and Robert MacLaverty (Managing Director, SEDA Experts), and Robert Thompson (Partner, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner). 

“Impact of COVID-19 on Market Efficiency” 2024, Journal of Accounting Literature, finds that “U.S. equities markets were statistically and economically significantly less efficient during the first two-three months of the COVID-19 lockdowns.” “Diligence, Objectivity, Quality, and Accuracy,” with Mahendra Gupta (Virgil Professor of Accounting and Former Dean, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis), 2023, Journal of Accounting Literature, provides a general framework of behavior under asymmetric information, that can be applied to a wide array of situations, for instance, accounting audits, quality inspection, regulatory reviews, etc., in order to systematically and objectively characterize and analyze diligence, objectivity, and quality by analysts and analyst firms. 

His recent article with Joseph Bial (Partner, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison) and Alex Evans (Senior Associate, Macfarlanes), “It is Imperative to Perform Event Studies Only With High-Frequency Intraday Data for Securities Litigations and Valuations,” 2023, Journal of International Business & Law,  shows that 1) systemically, two hours are sufficient to measure the impact of a potentially material event in question, and 2) if one were to use daily data, one would miss the impact of an event that reverts quickly, and/or worse yet, one could erroneously attribute the impact of entirely unrelated events to the potentially material event in question. 

His book Options and Market Efficiency: A Big Data Approach has received wide acclaim. He has also published highly-regarded articles in leading journals on securities class actions and efficiency of capital markets; options; capital asset pricing model (CAPM); agency theory; price wars and pricing; trust (over 1,350 citations); and other topics, in journals such as Berkeley Business Law Journal (“the top commercial law journal in the country”), Annals of Financial Economics, Journal of International Business and Law, Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship and the Law, Santa Clara Law Review, and Academy of Management Review (the best journal in management), in conference proceedings such as those of the Econometric Society (the leading scholarly organization for quantitative economics and finance); and in the Palgrave Encyclopedia (the ultimate authority on scholarly writing). 

He has been a testifying expert on a number of matters including level of efficiency of the market for a stock and its implications for the use of market price as an approximation for value; harm to investors under allegations of securities manipulation; measuring harm as a result of delays in delivery of options, warrants and other derivatives; class certification and damages in a class action; tying and price fixing; impact of alleged vertical foreclosure on price, quantity and quality; violation of intellectual property; and profits lost by a retailer due to directory error. 

Dr. Bhattacharya has extensive management experience with leading large and small teams of professionals and delivering with tight deadlines and impeccable quality; he has worked with leading consulting firms such as Boston Consulting Group, Law & Economics Consulting Group, and Berkeley Research Group (where he was Managing Director). As a manager and consulting expert in finance and Big Data, he has applied state-of-the-art and innovative economic and econometric methods (especially event studies) to litigation and regulation matters involving fraud on the market, including market manipulation (e.g., stocks, auction rate securities) and insider trading issues; impact of trades; best execution by financial institutions; trading by market makers and broker-dealers (e.g., interpositioning, trading ahead and front running); valuation of firms and portfolios; bankruptcy and fraudulent conveyance; book building, orders and laddering in public offerings; conflict of interest in analyst reports; and other issues involving stocks, bonds, options, warrants and other derivatives. He has advanced programming skills in SAS, and has over twenty years’ experience supervising programming in SAS and Stata. As a leader and consulting expert in applied microeconomics, he has applied advanced economic and statistical methods to complex litigation matters involving commercial disputes; market definition; monopolization; price fixing; single entity defense; off-label marketing; lost profits and reasonable royalties; price erosion; bankruptcy and fraudulent conveyance; tying; and auctions; across a variety of industries. He has also served as an expert in many class actions and damages matters. 

Dr. Bhattacharya has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester. He has been nominated for the Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law and Economics, University of Chicago Law School, 2024, and has been declared an Outstanding Researcher by the U.S. Federal Government.