Prof. Ramachandran completed his graduation and post-graduation from Madurai Kamaraj University, M. Phil. from Pondicherry University, and Ph. D. from the University of Hyderabad. Immediately after obtaining his Ph. D. degree, he joined as a Lecturer in Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune in the year 1994 and moved to Mumbai School of Economics, Mumbai University as a Reader in 1997. Having spent three years in Mumbai University, he moved to Madras School of Economics as an Associate Professor in 2001. Further, he joined as the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor, in the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore in 2004. He left the RBI Chair and joined as a professor in the Department of Economics, Pondicherry University, in the year 2006. He has 31 years of teaching and research experience.
Apart from teaching in the institutions where he served, he has been training officials of the RBI, officers of the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Statistical Service, and Indian Economic Service in the area of Macroeconomics and Econometrics during the last twenty-five years. He has conducted a number of conferences and workshops in Pondicherry University and in the institutions where he served previously.
He has 63 research articles published in reputed Journals such as Oxford Economic Papers, Economics Letters, Economic Modeling, Journal of Policy Modeling, Economic Notes, Economic and Political Weekly, etc., and presented a number of research papers in national and international conferences. In addition, he has completed a few Policy Studies, and two of the Policy Studies that he completed for the RBI received much appreciation. He has successfully guided 22 M. Phil. and 16 Ph. D.s so far, and more importantly, the Ph. D. scholars under his guidance have emerged as excellent teachers and researchers serving in reputed institutions like IITs, Central Universities in India, and in institutions abroad.
Recognizing his contribution to the literature on Econometrics, the Indian Econometric Society elected him as Vice President of the Society for the years 2015 to 2017 and President of the Indian Econometric Society for the years 2020-2023.

Monetary Economics, Open-economy Macroeconomics, Applied Econometrics