Lakshmi Bala, PhD, is an assistant professor of Banking and Finance at Case-Western University Weatherhead School of Management.   She earned her PhD and MS from Penn State University and an MA and BA from The National University of Singapore.  She teaches graduate-level courses in Credit Risk Analytics, Capital Markets and Banking. Her undergraduate teaching areas include Financial Modeling, Advanced Analytics and Corporate Finance. Prior to joining Case, Lakshmi was a Research Economist and Senior Quantitative Specialist in Banking Supervision and Regulation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.  

While at the Cleveland Fed, she was an Instructor for BASEL Wholesale Risk Quantification Training (Exposure-at-Default Module), Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, June 2014. Lakshmi is a co-founder of FinTechnova, LLC. She is an ardent supporter of female entrepreneurship and representation of women in the field of Finance and Financial Analytics. Currently, Dr. Bala is a faculty advisor for Weatherhead Women in Business. She believes all women should strive to INSPIRE fellow women by Innovating, Networking, Supporting, Promoting, Informing, Reaching out and encouraging Entrepreneurship among women. She is a frequent media contributor to Cleveland Channel News 5 on topics of financial literacy, access and inclusivity of finance through better education and technology. She is a co-author of  “How do lead banks use their Private Information in the Syndicated Loan Market?   Journal of Financial Stability” and other publications include “Causal Impact of Risk Oversight Functions on Bank Risk: Evidence from a Natural Experiment” (January 10, 2019). FRB of Cleveland Working Paper No. 19-01( with  Daniel, Naveen D. and Haubrich, Joseph G. and Naveen, Lalitha); “Evidence of Forward-Looking Loan Loss Provisioning with Credit Market Information,” July 2016, Journal of Financial Services Research (with James B. Thomson and Saeed Zaman); “Credit Market Information Feedback,” July 2016, Atlantic Economic Journal (with James B. Thomson, Ben Craig and Saeed Zaman); “Bank Balance Sheet Dynamics under a Regulatory Liquidity-Coverage Ratio (LCR) Constraint,” September 2013, Journal of Macroeconomics Volume 37, No. 1, pp 53-67 (with David VanHoose); and “Are Banks Forward-Looking in Their Loan Loss Provisioning? Evidence from the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) (October 11, 2014) FRB of Cleveland Working Paper No. 13-13r (with Zaman, Saeed and Thomson, James B.).