Dr. Pankaj Agrrawal
Pankaj Agrrawal, Ph.D., joined the University of Maine Business School in 2005, with nine years of executive experience in quantitative research and portfolio management. Previously he was portfolio manager and director of research at global asset management firms based in San Francisco, Boston, London, and Philadelphia. Over that time he also designed and taught doctoral/graduate finance courses at Golden Gate University (DBA 821, Financial Theory), Harvard Extn. (Finance CSS 318), and Drexel University (Executive MBA). He also completed the “Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance” executive education certificate course at the JFK School at Harvard University in 2001, and attributes that exposure to his interest in Investor Sentiment theory.
Dr. Agrrawal has published peer-reviewed papers in the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Behavioral Finance, Mathematics, Managerial Finance, JFP, JRFM, PLoS One, Journal of Investing, among others. He was quoted by the Wall Street Journal on July 9, 2011 for his research on an algorithmic misspecification afflicting most web charts, in 2024 that was included in IFA’s Global Finance Petition. His research on the inclusion of real estate ETFs in a multi-asset portfolio was featured in the New York Times on January 11, 2019. In 2012, he developed and released the Total Returns Stocks Dividends App via Apple’s App store. The app, which has been downloaded in 35 countries, rectifies the performance ranking problem and provides Total Return charts on over 20,000 stocks, ETFs, and indexes globally, his students have free usage of the app.
His research has been cited in Jama Psy, BJ Psych Open, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Physica A, Quantitative Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management among others. His research has also been referenced on the Frankfurt-DAX stock exchange website, and his biography included in the Marquis Who’s Who in Finance and Industry (1999). In 2006 he was elected to the membership of the CQA (Chicago Quantitative Alliance). He is an active reviewer for peer-reviewed journals including the European Journal of Finance.
In 2013, he was listed on Yahoo! Finance in an article by ETFdb.com on “17 ETF Friendly Professors” and referenced in this University of Maine press release. The University of Maine press release on his PLoS One paper (2017) linking market sentiment to human sentiment and subsequent suicides can be seen here.
Dr. Agrrawal values mentoring his undergraduate and graduate students and strives to inspire them with the workings of the capital markets and its computational aspects. He enjoys tennis, cricket, fitness, photography, volunteering (Junior Achievement of Maine, JA) and being with his family in Maine.
Education
- Ph.D., Finance, University of Alabama, 1996
- M.A., Finance, University of Alabama
- B.A., Economics, Honors, University of Delhi
Teaching Areas
- Investments
- Portfolio Management
- Corporate Finance
- Financial Markets
- Empirical Topics in Finance
- Behavioral Finance
- Computational Finance
- Link to FIN350, FIN352 and MBA651 course syllabus (past samples only)
- AI generative-bot to Agrrawal’s FIN 352 and FIN 651 (try in Beta mode, Spring 2024)
