2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Shohini Kundu, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Shohini Kundu
UCLA Anderson School of Management

“Shohini Kundu is an exceptional junior faculty member. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and a 2025 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Fellow, she is also a highly regarded corporate finance professor whose teaching spans UCLA Anderson’s full-time MBA, fully-employed MBA, and executive MBA formats. In Fall 2024, she achieved the rare distinction of receiving a perfect 5.0 rating from every student in her class.

“Her impact extends well beyond the classroom. Professor Kundu’s research has meaningfully impacted how regulators and policymakers think about financial stability, including work on systemic risk in the CLO market and the role of bank deposits in driving recessions. Her scholarship has been recognized by the Financial Stability Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the European Systemic Risk Board, and the FDIC. She has presented her work to the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the FDIC, and central banks across three continents. At a time when banking-sector fragility is a central public concern, she is contributing timely and policy-relevant insights.” – Avanidhar Subrahmanyam

Shohini Kundu, 30, is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and Assistant Professor of Law (by courtesy) at UCLA School of Law. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a leading international economics research network, in the Banking and Corporate Finance and Asset Pricing groups.  

Her research examines how financial institutions influence the broader economy: how shocks propagate through credit markets, how deposit dynamics drive macroeconomic fluctuations in ways that traditional models overlook, and how regulation reshapes the behavior of banks and borrowers, often in unexpected ways that its architects did not intend.  

Her research has been presented at universities, central banks and policy institutions around the world. In 2025, she was selected as a panelist on “The Fragility of Financial Systems” at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings alongside Nobel laureates Douglas Diamond, Philip Dybvig, and Bengt Holmström.  She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and an Aspen Ideas Festival Fellow. Her research has been recognized with the FDIC/Federal Reserve System John W. Ryan Best Paper Award, ECB Lamfalussy Research Fellowship, an NBER Market Frictions and Financial Risks Initiative Grant, and the BlackRock Applied Research Award, among other honors. 

Kundu received her Ph.D. in finance and M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and her B.A. from Cornell University.  

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2021 

Education:  

• PhD in Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business 

• MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business 

• BA, Cornell University (Magna Cum Laude) 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach:  Corporate Finance 

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …  Honestly, I’m not sure I ever did, at least not intentionally. I didn’t grow up knowing any economists in real life. The only ones I had encountered were on television or in the pages of the newspapers. This wasn’t a path I charted so much as one I stumbled into, and I’m glad it led me here. 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? My current research examines a consequential but overlooked feature of deposit insurance: because premiums are largely insensitive to risk, they create an implicit subsidy that increases exactly when banks are most fragile. We show that banks respond by expanding insured deposit supply when their risk increases, effectively leaning into the subsidy at the moment it is most distorting. This pattern is a systematic feature of how banks manage their funding, with real implications for the cost of deposit insurance and the design of banking regulations. 

This research builds on earlier work on reciprocal deposits, a relatively obscure instrument that has quietly expanded deposit insurance coverage across the banking system.  

If I weren’t a business school professor… I would be founding a startup. I have never been someone who can stay still for long. There is always a next problem, a next question, a next thing that needs building. Academia gave that restlessness a productive home.  

The skills are more similar than they appear. Identifying a problem that nobody has solved, working with people to believe in a vision when the evidence is preliminary, and building something from nothing while convincing skeptics that your ideas have merit. 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Finance is full of genuinely hard, unsettled questions, and some of my favorite moments in the classroom are when a student asks something about markets or the economy that I can’t immediately resolve. We talk through it together, develop hypotheses, test the merits of the arguments in real time. The best classes teach me something too. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: The job is a portfolio problem. Research, teaching, service, life outside the office. The returns are correlated in ways you don’t always expect, and neglecting any one of them tends to show up somewhere else eventually. I’m still figuring out the right balance. 

Professor I most admire and why: Too many to list. The professors I admire most are the ones who made time when they didn’t have to, who gave honest feedback instead of comfortable feedback, and who treated a confused undergraduate/graduate student like someone worth investing in. I have been lucky enough to have a few of those.  

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? Teaching people who have real skin in the game: people who navigate organizations, make decisions with incomplete information, and care deeply about what happens in the real world. That makes the material feel important in a way it otherwise wouldn’t. I find that energizing. 

What is most challenging? The range. Some students walk in having spent years in finance and can anticipate where I am going before I get there. Others are encountering the material for the first time. Keeping these groups engaged, in the same room, is challenging. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… demanding but fair. I cover a lot of material without diluting the content. I think students are far more capable than they sometimes give themselves credit for. I also tell them not to fixate on grades but to focus on understanding what’s actually happening and why. The rest takes care of itself. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? My hobbies have evolved with my geography. Living in the Midwest and the Northeast, my favorite pastime was escaping to somewhere warm. Now that I’m in California, I have traded that for the outdoors: hiking, the beach, working out outside, though I still rarely turn down a chance to travel! 

When I’m not outside, I enjoy dancing, playing piano, making my way through museums and theaters, and eating my weight in desserts.  

How will you spend your summer? Teaching in the executive MBA program, traveling to conferences, and continuing my research. If I’m lucky, I’ll also get to cleaning my desk. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation: Anywhere along the Mediterranean! The coastline makes it easy to do everything and nothing at the same time. 

Favorite book(s): One Hundred Years of Solitude 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much?  I have been watching Severance. The premise of surgically separating your “work-self” from your “personal-self” is either deeply harrowing, or, depending on the week, aspirational 😊 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? I struggle with this question because choosing one feels like a betrayal to the others. On any given day my playlist moves from classical piano to pop to hip hop to Bollywood. I have stopped looking for a throughline. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… I would love to see more practitioners teaching alongside academics, not as guest speakers but as co-instructors. A CFO walking through how they actually think about a capital structure decision, or, an investor dissecting a live deal. Not to replace theory or cases, but to bring in what they cannot fully capture: the messiness, the judgment calls, the decisions that only make sense in hindsight. 

I would also open the doors wider to other disciplines like law, medicine, and engineering. The most interesting questions in business don’t announce themselves as business questions. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…knowing what to ignore.  

I’m grateful for… the mentors, and peers who brought me here, and the students and colleagues who continue to push my thinking. And for my big sister, who has never once stopped keeping her annoying little sister in check.  

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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