Dr. Mohammad Rahaman
Faculty - Finance
Dr. Mohammad Rahaman is a Canada Research Chair, Finance and International Competitiveness; Associate Dean, Strategic Partnerships & Community Engagement and Professor at the Sobey School of Business of Saint Mary’s University. He received his PhD in Economics and Finance from the University of Toronto, Canada and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, U.K. His research interests are mainly in the area of pricing and design of syndicated loans, corporate restructuring, and international competitiveness of firms. Dr. Rahaman regularly publishes in leading academic journals and contributes to public discourse through popular media and press. His research secured multiple prestigious external research grants, received competitive international research awards, and is regularly being presented in internationally recognized conferences.
In his most recent work, published in the Journal of Banking & Finance, he and co-authors demonstrate that supply chain disruptions and power dynamics can have significant credit risk implications for the structure and design of bank loans of supply-chain dependent firms. In another published paper, he shows that, contrary to popular discontent, engaging in international business activities via trade liberalization can indeed be a positive-sum game for both low- and high-wage countries and the key to unlocking the gains from globalization for firms in high-wage countries like Canada is to move up in the global technology and productivity spectrum. His research has also made significant contribution in our understanding of how corporate diversification strategy can provide material insurance against economic disruptions, how small and medium-sized enterprises can overcome their financing constraints and contribute to employment growth in the economy, how a firm’s organizational structure and managerial human capital can determine why some firms succeed while others fail, and how the breadth and the depth of a country’s capital market can attenuate the detrimental impacts of financial crises on firm performances.
Dr. Rahaman has made it a mission in his research pursuit to study real impact of economic disruptions like COVID-19 global pandemic -- what breeds them, what propagates them, what makes society more susceptible to them, and what policy makers can do to stop them. After the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 and the ensuing great recession, central banks in advanced economies unleashed unprecedented credit easing resulting in a sustained period of low interest in many countries, including Canada. The COVID-19 global pandemic has yet again forced central banks to engage in extraordinary credit-market interventions. Against this backdrop, Dr. Rahaman is investigating how such a prolong period a low interest rate, orchestrated by central banks, has impacted firm growth, sustainability, credit risk, and the dynamics of the syndicated loan market in North America.