Rajnish Mehra holds the E.N. Basha Arizona Heritage Chair in Finance and Economics at Arizona State University, and is a Research Associate of the NBER. His research interests focus on capital markets, asset pricing and growth theory. His current research is concerned with the financial implications of privatizing the Social Security Trust Fund and with the influence of bequests on the pricing of financial assets. He has published in Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, The Financial Analysts Journal, Annals of Finance and other journals. His work has been featured in The Financial Times, The Economist and in Business Week. He has been awarded a Graham and Dodd scroll for excellence in financial writing by the Association for Investment Management and Research. 

He holds a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. in computer science from Rice University, an M.S. in industrial administration and a Ph.D. in finance from the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie-Mellon University.