Rate My Professor Duminda Kuruppuarachchi

Dr Duminda Kuruppuarachchi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accountancy and Finance within the Otago Business School at the University of Otago. He joined the University of Otago in 2018 as a Lecturer and has since been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Prior to this, he served as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Sri Lanka, and as a visiting Lecturer at the University of Moratuwa and the University of Colombo, also in Sri Lanka. His academic background includes a PhD from the University of Otago in Financial Econometrics, an MBA from the University of Moratuwa, a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Management from the University of Colombo, and a BSc from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Duminda has specialised in Financial Econometrics and Applied Statistics, with expertise in statistical software such as STATA, SPSS, EVIEWS, AMOS, SMART-PLS, and MATLAB programming for econometric analysis. He has extensive experience supervising undergraduate, masters, and PhD students, and has held administrative roles including acting chair of the research committee at the Department of Accounting and Finance in Sri Lanka.

His research interests encompass Environmental and Climate Finance, Market Efficiency and Information Spillovers in Financial Markets, and Financial Modelling and Empirical Asset Pricing. He is a member and Co-Director of the Climate Energy and Finance research group (CEFGroup) at the department. Dr Kuruppuarachchi teaches courses such as FINC 308: Financial Econometrics and FINC 406: Advanced Financial Econometrics. His accolades include the Alan MacGregor Prize for the outstanding student from the Department of Accountancy and Finance at Otago, the Otago Doctoral Scholarship, a Gold Medal for outstanding performance in the MBA programme at the University of Moratuwa, and a Best Research Paper Award at an international conference. He was a finalist for the OUSA Supervisor of the Year 2023 in Commerce. Key publications include Perera et al. (2026) 'Climate change and idiosyncratic volatility: Moderating role of ESG disclosure' in Applied Economics; Liao, Diaz-Rainey, and Kuruppuarachchi (2025) 'The interplay of carbon offset, renewable energy certificate and electricity markets in Australia' in Energy Economics; Perera et al. (2025) 'Climate risk and the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle' in Applied Economics; and Fernando, Onishchenko, and Kuruppuarachchi (2024) 'Do short sellers amplify extreme market declines?' in Pacific-Basin Finance Journal. His PhD thesis, completed in 2015, is titled 'Efficiency, Risk Premiums and Information Diffusion in Futures Markets'.