Rajiv Sethi joined the faculty of Barnard in 1995. In addition to his teaching duties for the Barnard economics department, he is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia, and regularly teaches graduate courses in Columbia's economics department and the School of International and Public Affairs. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Professor Sethi's teaching includes courses in financial economics, the economics of inequality, and mathematical methods. His recent research deals with credit derivatives and sovereign default, the dynamics of beliefs on networks, the economics of crime, and persistent inequality between social groups. He has also worked on the evolution of social norms and interdependent preferences, decision-making under bounded rationality, and the dynamics of asset prices in financial markets.