Walton MBA professor Dr. Raja Kali currently serves as the chair of the Department of Economics and holds the ConocoPhillips
Chair in International Economics and Business at the University of Arkansas. He also
served as faculty director of MBA Programs from 2016-2018.
Originally from West Bengal, India, Kali received his Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Calcutta and a masters and a doctorate in economics from the University of Maryland – College Park. He has been a visiting research scholar at the Indian School of Business, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, University of Melbourne and the London School of Economics. While he grew up bilingual in Bengali and English, over the years he has learned to speak in Hindi, Spanish, and French.
“My first job was in Mexico City,” Kali said. “I went to teach in an elite school for economics called ITAM.” Before coming to the University of Arkansas, Kali enjoyed living and teaching in Mexico for three years. From 2016-2018, Kali served as director of MBA programs at the Walton College and implemented a revision of the EMBA program. Alongside Allan Ellstrand, Kali introduced focus study tracks, a Data Visualization course, the Healthcare EMBA and a Global Business course incorporating immersion trips to China and India. “As a part of that, I led a trip of about 30 EMBA students for three years, from 2016-2018, to China,” he said.
In 2018, Kali took on his current role of chair of the Department of Economics in the Walton College, where he launched a new Master of Science in Economic Analytics program in 2020. Additionally, he serves as the endowed ConocoPhillips Chair in International Economics and Business. The ConocoPhillips Chair allows him to use resources to advance research and education in international business. His efforts to advance the college in these areas have included teaching the EMBA global business class and leading global immersion trips to China as part of the class.
“I also use [the ConocoPhillips Chair] to fund education and research for graduate students,” he said. Kali’s international efforts also include “pursuing collaborative research with people in different parts of the world, including having co-authors in Italy, France, Canada, Japan, India and Australia.”
“My research has examined the impact of globalization in international trade, financial crises and economic growth,” Kali said. His current favorite research project is applying network methods to economic problems. He described network effects as “the idea that, for many of our data economy products that we use these days like Facebook and Uber and Amazon, the value of a product rises as more people use it because we are all on the same network, so we benefit from standardization and compatibility.” He stated that network methods give people the ability to see patterns in data that aren’t usually visible using traditional methods. “These ideas about network science come from physics and are incredibly applicable in many areas,” Kali said.
As a professor in the Walton MBA program, Kali enjoys discussing microeconomics, industrial organization, emerging markets, managerial economics, information economics and game theory. “One of the things I really enjoy is trying to make economics applicable and practical,” he said. After teaching MBA classes such as Managerial Economics and Global Business, he believes that economics provides students with the ability to better understand business decisions and the world. “Students say that they are amazed by how useful economics is in their professional lives,” he said.
He likes to show students that supply and demand are everywhere and that every business problem has two sides. “The other concepts that are particularly useful for business students to understand are the role of fixed costs and how that leads to economies of scale, and how that can create advantages for businesses that have already moved along the average cost curve,” he said.
One of Kali’s students Meina Cogan (EMBA ’22) stated that she was very grateful to be in his class. “He is very knowledgeable and always very well prepared for his classes,” she said. “He has a unique way of synthesizing highly complex and unfamiliar ideas making them easy to understand. He is very approachable, patient, helpful and genuinely cares about his students. He is the highlight of the EMBA program!”
While reflecting on advice he would give to students who want to continue learning outside the classroom, Kali said, “One of the keys to success is to always be a student.” He encourages students to follow the news and provides them with a reading list to continue learning at the end of his EMBA classes.
“One of the most rewarding parts of being a professor is that I get to become friends with many of the students and I establish relationships which have endured for many years,” Kali said. “I feel like I always learn things from my students.”
Read Dr. Kali’s Google Scholar page and personal website.
