Adriano Rampini is the Douglas and Josie Breeden Professor of Financial Economics, a Professor of Finance and Economics, and the area coordinator of the finance area at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business with a secondary appointment in the department of economics. Professor Rampini received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and was on the faculty at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management prior to joining Fuqua.
Professor Rampini’s expertise is in financial economics and macroeconomics. He is known for his work on capital reallocation, leasing, collateral, and risk management. In his work in macro finance he has studied the procyclical nature of capital reallocation, the role of intermediary capital, and the variation of entrepreneurial activity and default over the business cycle. In his work on dynamic corporate finance, he has shown that financially constrained firms lease capital assets instead of buying them and buy less durable and used capital assets instead of more durable and new ones. His recent work on the dynamics of risk management explains why poorly capitalized firms typically hedge less and may not engage in risk management at all, a fact previously considered a puzzle. He has also argued that collateral is a primary determinant of capital structure and is currently studying the dynamics of household insurance and the role of secured debt in firm financing.
Professor Rampini’s research has been published in top economics and finance journals including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, was an invited speaker at the Review of Economic Studies European Meetings, and received the 2008 Jensen Second Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of corporate finance and organizations. He is the President of the Foundation for Advancement of Research in Financial Economics, the Vice President of the Financial Intermediation Research Society, and a past President of the Finance Theory Group. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
He was the Inaugural Distinguished Salomon Center Visitor and Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, a Visiting Fellow in the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University, a Visiting Professor of Economics in the department of economics at Harvard University, the Elwell research visitor in the finance department at the University of Minnesota, a visiting scholar in the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and Richmond, the department of economics at MIT, and the finance area at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and New York.