About

Professor Ravi Bapna is the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems and serves as the Academic Director of the Carlson Analytics Lab at the Carlson School of Management. He is closely affiliated with the school's MS in Business Analytics program and the Carlson Analytics Lab, where graduate students study a broad range of data analysis techniques and apply them to real business problems. These students are skilled in exploratory data visualization, predictive analytics, programming, data engineering, machine learning methods, and more, emerging as data science professionals. Partner organizations have the opportunity to work with these talented students while supporting the educational mission of the programs. The faculty involved in the Analytics for Good Institute include scholars from across the Carlson School and beyond, bringing expertise in areas such as computer science, econometrics, strategy, and causal experimentation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Applied psychology
• Psychiatry
• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Environmental health
• Accounting
• Business
• Algorithm
• Mathematics
• Financial economics
• Geometry
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Geography
• Law
• Economics

Selected publications

• Opening the gate to include people of colour in professional psychology: Reply to Canadian Psychological Association (2026).

  Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne · 2026-03-23

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Is It all Noise? The Microstructure Implications of Corporate Recurring Advertisements

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2025-04-25 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract This paper studies the market microstructure implications of uninformed trading volume. We capture uninformed volume using spikes in retail trading triggered by weekly advertisements (ads) in the Wall Street Journal that are largely duplicates. We report three findings. First, consistent with a positive volume-volatility relation, stock price volatility amplifies on recurring ad days. Second, informed investors time liquidity to trade more aggressively on recurring ad days. Third, despite the increase in informed trading on such days, price impact is lower, yielding a negative volume–price impact relation. Collectively, the evidence supports the theoretical predictions of Collin-Dufresne and Fos (2016).

  PublisherDOI

• Strategic (Inconsistent) Disclosures and Sophisticated Investors: Evidence from Hedge Funds

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2025-09-02

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Recent SEC regulations require that qualified hedge fund advisers provide their investors with narrative disclosures of their business and operations. We find that 40% of these disclosures omit or de‐emphasize information regarding advisers' operational and investment risks when compared to other sources of public information. Funds with such “inconsistencies” are associated with predictably lower fund performance but do not differ in their fund flows, flow‐performance relation, ownership structure, or management fees. These results are consistent with investors being subject to limited strategic thinking, which prevents them from fully unraveling the implications of strategic omissions. This, in turn, contributes to advisers' successful use of discretion to de‐emphasize information with adverse performance implications. Our findings suggest that information processing frictions can facilitate nondisclosure, even in markets with sophisticated investors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sleeping for two: A randomized controlled trial of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT I) delivered in pregnancy and secondary impacts on symptoms of postpartum depression

  Journal of Affective Disorders · 2024-07-18 · 11 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• A Correlation-Based Portfolio Choice Algorithm

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2024

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Algorithm

  Analyzing the correlation matrix of listed stocks, we identify “singletons” that table minimal cross-sectional correlations. Portfolios comprising 100–500 singletons all have lower betas and standard deviations and, correspondingly, higher average Sharpe and Treynor ratios than the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) universe over the sample time period 1950–2017. Portfolios of singletons chosen from subsets of the CRSP universe, including small-value, low-variability, and momentum stocks, similarly realize lower portfolio standard deviations and higher risk-adjusted returns. These well-diversified portfolios suggest that the positive abnormal returns to low-beta portfolios are driven by their component stocks having low average cross-sectional correlation. One of the authors invested $20, 000 of his own money in the algorithm-chosen 240 stock singleton portfolio over a 4-year period (2015–2018) and beat the market year-by-year on a risk-adjusted basis just as our results predicted.

  PublisherDOI

• Financial Costs of Judicial Inexperience: Evidence From Corporate Bankruptcies

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2022-07-11 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Exploiting the random assignment of judges to corporate bankruptcy filings, we estimate financial costs of judicial inexperience. Despite new judges’ prior legal experience, formal education, and rigorous hiring process, their public Chapter 11 cases spend 19% more time in bankruptcy, realize 31% higher legal and professional fees, and 21% lower creditor recovery rates. Examining possible mechanisms, we find that new judges take longer to rule on motions and cases assigned to these judges file more plans of reorganization. Conservative estimates suggest that minor policy adjustments could increase creditor recoveries by approximately $16.8 billion for the public firms in our sample.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2021 Excellence in Refereeing

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Accounting
  DOI

• Can behavioral interventions be too salient? Evidence from traffic safety messages

  Science · 2022 · 37 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Applied psychology

  Although behavioral interventions are designed to seize attention, little consideration has been given to the costs of doing so. We estimated these costs in the context of a safety campaign that, to encourage safe driving, displays traffic fatality counts on highway dynamic message signs for 1 week each month. We found that crashes increase statewide during campaign weeks, which is inconsistent with any benefits. Furthermore, these effects do not persist beyond campaign weeks. Our results show that behavioral interventions, particularly negatively framed ones, can be too salient, crowding out more important considerations and causing interventions to backfire-with costly consequences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Roadside safety messages increase crashes by distracting drivers

  2022-05-29

  preprintSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Dark Side of Nudges

  TheScienceBreaker · 2022-09-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Among other methods, governments use highway message signs to encourage responsible driving. We find that displaying year-to-day roadside fatality counts leads to an immediate increase in traffic crashes. We argue that the statistics distract drivers at precisely the moments when they should focus on the road.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Frederick E. Domann

  10 shared

• Wei Wang

  7 shared

• Vivian W. Fang

  Indiana University

  7 shared

• Douglas R. Spitz

  6 shared

• Jonathan D. Hall

  University of Alabama

  5 shared

• Melissa L.T. Teoh

  5 shared

• Benjamin Charles Iverson

  Brigham Young University

  5 shared

• Qiping Xu

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Accounting

  University of Chicago

  2013