Mahadevan "Suresh" Sundaresan

Program Fellow

Suresh Sundaresan is the Chase Manhattan Bank Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University. He has published in the areas of Treasury auctions, bidding, default risk, habit formation, term structure of interest rates, asset pricing, investment theory, pension asset allocation, swaps, options, forwards, futures, fixed-income securities markets and risk management. His research papers have appeared in major journals such as the Journal of FinanceReview of Financial Studies, Journal of BusinessJournal of Financial and Quantitative AnalysisEuropean Economic ReviewJournal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Political Economy, etc. He has also contributed articles in Financial Times, and World Bank Conferences. He is an associate editor of Journal of Finance and Review of Derivatives Research. His current research focus is on default risk and how its affects asset pricing and sovereign debt securities. He has worked as a senior strategist at Lehman Brothers in their Fixed Income Division during 1986-1987. He has consulted full time for Morgan Stanley Asset Management during 2000-2001. His consulting work focuses on term structure models, swap pricing models, credit risk models, valuation, and risk management. He has conducted training programs for leading investment banks including, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, CSFB and Lehman Brothers. He is the author of the text Fixed-Income Markets and Their Derivatives. He has served on the Treasury Bond Markets Advisory Committee. He was the resident scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during 2006.

Sundaresan has testified before the United States Congress on the transparency of Corporate Bond Markets. His current research work focuses on corporate bankruptcy, design of bankruptcy code, the role of collateral in interest rate swaps, and the role of central bank in providing liquidity to private capital markets. More recently, he has been working on micro-lending with a view to characterizing defaults, recovery rates, and interest rates in micro-loans. The research attempts to characterize the efforts that are needed to lower the borrowing rates. Another ongoing project explores whether the duration of the borrowing relationship has led to an improvement of borrower's welfare. At Columbia University, he is responsible for teaching two MBA elective courses: Debt Markets, and Advanced Derivatives. He has trained MBA and PhD students, who currently serve on the faculty at universities in the United States and abroad as well as in senior positions in major investment banks around the world.