Prasanna Gai is professor of macroeconomics at the University of Auckland. He was appointed as Special Adviser to the Governor of the Bank of Canada (Mark Carney) for 2010-2011, and as the Academic Fellow of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 2012. Prior to his current position at Auckland, Professor Gai was professor of economics at the Australian National University and served as Senior Adviser at the Bank of England, responsible for directing its financial stability research. He holds a D.Phil and M.Phil in economics from the University of Oxford and a bachelor of economics (with honours) from the Australian National University.
Professor Gai has published widely on financial stability issues, and his work on financial networks (with Andy Haldane and Sujit Kapadia) has been widely cited since the global financial crisis. During his time at the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, he initiated and helped establish formal systemic stress-test models for the U.K. and Canadian banking systems (RAMSI – Risk Assessment Model for Systemic Institutions, and MFRAF – Macro-Financial Risk Assessment Framework). Significant publications include Systemic Risk – The Dynamics of Modern Financial Systems (Oxford University Press, 2013), a formal treatment of financial stability based on network methods, and Private Sector Involvement and International Financial Crises - An Analytical Approach (Oxford University Press, 2005, with M. Chui), which provided the first formal analysis of private sector bail in issues, collective action clauses, and the IMF’s sovereign debt restructuring mechanism.