Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy and Director of the Master of Public Policy Program at the
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
’s
Blavatnik School of Government
The Blavatnik School of Government is a school of public policy founded in 2010 at the University of Oxford in England. The School was founded following a £75 million donation from a business magnate Leonard Blavatnik, supported by £26 million ...
, where he established the leadership curriculum on building trust across divided communities.
In 2019, he advised on the UK’s reforms of the audit profession. 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. The E-liability method won the Harvard Business Review-McKinsey Prize for “groundbreaking management thinking.”
Ramanna's scholarship has also explored regulation and decision-making at the
Financial Accounting Standards Board
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is a private standard-setting body whose primary purpose is to establish and improve Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) within the United States in the public's interest. The Securi ...
and the
International Accounting Standards Board
The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is the independent accounting standard-setting body of the IFRS Foundation.
The IASB was founded on April 1, 2001, as the successor to the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). ...
. He has also written about the costs and benefits of
fair value accounting
Mark-to-market (MTM or M2M) or fair value accounting is accounting for the "fair value" of an asset or liability based on the current market price, or the price for similar assets and liabilities, or based on another objectively assessed "fair" ...
. 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
Advocacy groups, also known as interest groups, special interest groups, lobbying groups or pressure groups use various forms of advocacy in order to influence public opinion and ultimately policy. They play an important role in the developm ...
possess relevant
tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract, and thus more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This ...
. This situation can result in
regulatory capture
In politics, regulatory capture (also agency capture and client politics) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests ...
.
Ramanna is a proponent of reforming
business ethics
Business ethics (also known as Corporate Ethics) is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics, that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business co ...
education, arguing that corporate managers have unique capabilities and duties to steward the basic institutions of capitalism. Prior to Oxford, Ramanna taught leadership, ethics, and financial reporting at
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...
, where he won the International Case Centre's Outstanding Case-Writer prize, dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.” He was recruited to Oxford’s government school from Harvard to help develop the
case method The case method is a teaching approach that uses decision-forcing cases to put students in the role of people who were faced with difficult decisions at some point in the past. It developed during the course of the twentieth-century from its origin ...
of education for public administration, and he has since won the Outstanding Case-Writer prize for Oxford as well.
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;
*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.
References
External links
Blavatnik School of Government, University of OxfordHarvard Business SchoolThe Case Centre
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ramanna, Karthik
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Academics of the University of Oxford
Harvard Business School faculty
American academics of Indian descent