Manju Puri

Academic Area: Finance

Teaching / Research Interests

Financial Intermediation and Capital Markets, Advanced Corporate Finance

Bio

Manju Puri is the J. B. Fuqua Professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She is currently on leave from Fuqua and serves as the Director, Center for Financial Research at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Professor Puri is a member of the finance faculty at Fuqua and is on the Advisory Board of the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She earned her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and her Ph.D in Finance from Stern School, New York University, after which she joined the faculty of the Stanford Business School. She moved to Fuqua in 2003. 

Professor Puri’s expertise is in the area of empirical corporate finance and financial intermediation, with focus on commercial banks, investment banks, venture capital and entrepreneurship. Her research has won multiple awards including three Fama-DFA best paper awards in Journal of Financial Economics and two Western Finance Association best paper awards. Professor Puri’s research has appeared in publications such as American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. Professor Puri has served as coeditor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation, as well as on the editorial boards of several journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Financial Research and Journal of Financial Services Research. She is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, and was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. She is currently President of the Financial Intermediation Research Society. 

Professor Puri has served multiple regulatory authorities in the US and India. In addition to her current position as Director, Center for Financial Research, FDIC, she has served on the Financial Advisory Roundtable at the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, and the Model Validation Council, Board of Governors, Fed. She has also served on a Committee on the commission structure of financial product distributors for the Ministry of Finance, Government of India (Bose Committee). She is currently on the Advisory Board of CAFRAL Research Institute of the Reserve Bank of India.  

Professor Puri''s work is relevant in understanding the role of venture capitalists in startups, entrepreneurial attitudes, bank-firm and bank-depositor relationships, the scope of bank activities, how shocks to banks get transmitted internationally, and factors underlying bank runs. Professor Puri teaches an elective she created on “Raising Capital” for the MBA students at Fuqua. She  has also taught a Ph.D class on Empirical Corporate Finance and has taught MBA electives in Advanced Corporate Finance, and Venture Capital Financing at Fuqua and Stanford Business School.