Karthik Ramanna

Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy and Director of the Master of Public Policy Program at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.^[1] From 2016 to 2023, he was director of Oxford’s Master of Public Policy Program, where he established the leadership curriculum on building trust across divided communities.^[2]

Karthik Ramanna
Citizenship	American
Occupation	Economist
Academic background
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Academic work
Discipline	Economist
Sub-discipline	Financial Regulation
Institutions	Oxford University
Website	https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/karthik-ramanna

Career

Ramanna received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 2007 whereupon he joined the faculty of Harvard Business School.^[3]

Ramanna's scholarship has also explored regulation and decision-making at the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board.^[4] He has also written about the costs and benefits of fair value accounting.^[5] His 2015 book Political Standards posits that accounting rule-making is an exemplar of a "thin political market," a regulatory setting of economic consequence in which the general public is largely disinterested and where corporate special interests possess relevant tacit knowledge. This situation can result in regulatory capture.^[6]

Ramanna is a proponent of reforming business ethics education, arguing that corporate managers have unique capabilities and duties to steward the basic institutions of capitalism.^[7] Prior to Oxford, Ramanna taught leadership, ethics, and financial reporting at Harvard Business School, where he won the International Case Centre's Outstanding Case-Writer prize, dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.”^[8] He was recruited to Oxford’s government school from Harvard to help develop the case method of education for public administration,^[9] and he has since won the Outstanding Case-Writer prize at Oxford as well.^[10]

In 2019, he advised on the UK’s reforms of the audit profession.^[11][12] In 2021, he co-developed with Robert S. Kaplan the E-liability method for climate accounting as an alternative to the GHG Protocol’s Scope 3 standard, which they posited has hindered innovation on emissions reduction.^[13] The E-liability method won the Harvard Business Review-McKinsey Prize for “groundbreaking management thinking.”^[14]

In 2023, Ramanna was named an advisor to the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.^[15]

Publications

• Ramanna, K. Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; ISBN 0-2262-1074-X
• Ramanna, K. “Building a Culture of Challenge in Audit Firms,” PwC Future of Audit Initiative, 2019: 1 - 26.
• Ramanna, K. “Friedman at 50: Is it Still the Social Responsibility of Business to Increase Profits?,” California Management Review, 2020, 62, no. 3: 28 – 41.
• Kaplan, Robert S., and Karthik Ramanna. “Accounting for Climate Change.” Harvard Business Review, 2021, 99, nos. 11/12: 120 – 131.