Your
photo here
Rajesh Tharyan

Associate Professor  ·  Finance & Accounting  ·  University of Exeter

Research at the edge of markets and meaning.

I study corporate finance, asset pricing, and financial economics — building tools, datasets, and ideas that push the field forward.


Research

01

Corporate Investment & Cash Flow Sensitivity

Examining how financial constraints shape the relationship between internal funds and capital expenditure across market cycles.

Journal of Financial Economics · 2023

Corporate FinancePanel Data
Read Paper ↗

02

Earnings Quality & Mispricing

Linking accrual-based earnings quality measures to cross-sectional return predictability in international equity markets.

Review of Finance · 2022

Asset PricingAccounting
Read Paper ↗

03

ESG Uncertainty & the Cost of Capital

Does ambiguity in ESG ratings translate to a measurable discount rate premium? Evidence from a novel rating-dispersion instrument.

Working Paper · 2024

ESGCost of Capital
SSRN Preprint ↗

04

Analyst Herding & Information Diffusion

Strategic behaviour among sell-side analysts: when do forecasters cluster, and what does it mean for price discovery?

Journal of Accounting Research · 2021

AnalystsInformation
Read Paper ↗

Software & Tools

01

FinScrape

An open-source Python library for downloading, cleaning, and structuring financial statement data from EDGAR and Compustat mirrors.

PythonOpen SourceEDGAR
GitHub ↗

02

AccrualKit

R package implementing 14 accrual quality measures from the academic literature with a unified, tidy-data interface.

RPackageCRAN
CRAN ↗

03

ESGDivergence

Interactive web dashboard that visualises cross-provider ESG rating disagreement for any MSCI World constituent in real time.

ShinyESGDashboard
Live App ↗

Databases & Datasets

01

UK Earnings Quality Panel

Hand-collected panel of earnings quality measures for all LSE-listed firms from 1990–2022, linked to Datastream identifiers.

1,840 firms · 33 years · Updated annually

UK EquitiesAccounting
Download ↗

02

Global ESG Dispersion Database

Monthly ESG rating disagreement scores across six major providers for 5,000+ global firms. Freely available for academic use.

5,200 firms · 2010–2024 · 6 providers

ESGGlobal
Access Data ↗

03

Analyst Forecast Archive

Comprehensive archive of I/B/E/S analyst forecasts augmented with broker identity, career history, and brokerage size proxies.

12M+ forecasts · 1985–2023

AnalystsI/B/E/S
Request Access ↗

Writing, Blogs & Podcasts

Blog

Why ESG Ratings Disagree So Much

A plain-English explainer on the measurement and methodology gaps driving divergence across rating providers.

Read on Substack ↗
Podcast

The Measure of a Market — Episode 14

Discussing earnings quality and what it really tells us about firm fundamentals with host Priya Nair.

Listen ↗
Blog

Replication in Finance: A Quiet Crisis

Are the classic anomalies still alive? A review of the out-of-sample evidence and what it means for factor investing.

Read on Medium ↗
Podcast

Accounting for Returns — Episode 7

How accruals predict future returns, and the often misunderstood mechanics behind the accrual anomaly.

Listen ↗
Blog

Open Data in Empirical Finance

Making the case for freely accessible research databases and what the field can learn from computational biology.

Read ↗
Other Activity

PhD Supervision & Teaching

Currently supervising four doctoral students in empirical corporate finance. Module lead for Advanced Financial Econometrics.

Teaching page ↗

Rigorous work, openly shared.

I am an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Exeter Business School. My research sits at the intersection of corporate finance, financial accounting, and asset pricing, with a particular interest in how information quality shapes capital allocation.

I am committed to open and reproducible research. All datasets and software I produce are made freely available to the academic community. I also write and speak publicly about finance and methodology for non-specialist audiences.

Affiliations & Areas

Corporate Finance Asset Pricing Financial Accounting ESG Empirical Methods University of Exeter CEPR Open Data

Let's talk research.

Open to collaborations, seminar invitations, and media enquiries.