Dr. M. Hashem Pesaran is the John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at USC Dornsife, and the Director of Center for Applied Financial Economics (http://dornsife.usc.edu/center-cafe/). He was the Director of the USC Dornsife Institute of New Economic Thinking (http://dornsife.usc.edu/inet) from August 2014 through June 2018. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University and a lifetime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, he was head of the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran (1974-76) and the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Education (1976-78), Iran. He has also been a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Applied Econometrics Program at UCLA (1989-93), and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, and a visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Pesaran is a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society and the Journal of Econometrics. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Salford in 1993, the University of Goethe, Frankfurt in 2008, the University of Maastricht in 2013, and the University of Economics in Prague in 2016. In September 2013, he was named as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Economics. More recently he was named by
Thomson Reuters as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds for 2014 and 2015.
He received the George Sell Prize (1990), the Royal Economic Society Prize (1992), the Best Paper Award of Econometric Reviews (2004-2005), Best Paper award of the International Journal of Forecasting (2007), Econometric Theory Award (2008), was named the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Economics (2013).
He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Economic Research Forum (Middle East), and the World Bank's Council of Advisers for the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Pesaran was a charter member of the Oliver Wyman Institute, was appointed vice president in charge of development and computerized trading systems at Tudor Investment Corporation and has held a partnership in GSA Capital Partners LLC. Dr. Pesaran is the founding editor of The Journal of Applied Econometrics, and a codeveloper of Microfit, an econometric software package published by Oxford University Press (2009). President of the International Iranian Economic Association, 2013-2016, (http://www.iraneconomics.org/ ), and a co-founder the Chair of the Board Directors of the International Association for Applied Econometrics (http://appliedeconometrics.org/).
Dr. Pesaran’s early work focused on the problem of model selection and hypothesis testing, in particular where the hypotheses under consideration are separate or nonnested. Later he started to work on the identification and solution of rational expectations, and the problem of aggregation in econometric modeling. More recently, his research has focused on the econometric analysis of heterogeneous dynamic panels
with unobserved common effects, spatial dependence, panel unit root tests, analysis of panel vector autoregressive models, global vector autoregressive (GVAR) modeling, economic and financial forecasting in the presence of structural breaks, credit risk analysis and portfolio optimization. He is an expert in the economics of oil and the Middle East and currently the number of his citations on Google Scholar exceeds 78K.
He has over 220 publications in leading scientific journals and edited volumes in the areas of econometrics, empirical finance and macroeconomics and the Iranian economy, and is an expert in the economics of oil and the Middle East. He published Time Series and Panel Data Econometrics (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the author of The imits to Rational Expectations (Blackwell), and Time Series and Panel Data Econometrics (Oxford University Press, 2015), and co-author of several books: Dynamic
Regression: Theory and Algorithms (with Lucy Slater); Keynes' Economics: Methodological Issues, (ed. with Tony Lawson); Disaggregation in Economic Modeling (ed. with Terry Barker); Non-linear Dynamics, Chaos and Econometrics (JW, ed. with Simon Potter); Blackwell's Handbook of Applied Econometrics: Volume I, Macroeconomics (ed. with Mike Wickens), and Volume II, Microeconomics (ed. with Peter Schmidt); Energy Demand in Asian Developing Economies (with Ron Smith and Taka Akiyama, OUP); Analysis of Panels and Limited Dependent Variables: A Volume in Honour of G S Maddala (ed. with Cheng Hsiao, Kajal Lahiri and Lung-Fei Lee, CUP); Global and National Macroeconometric Modelling: A Long Run Structural Approach (with Garratt, Lee, and Shin, OUP, 2006); Explaining Growth in the Middle East, (ed. with Jeff Nugent, North-Holland, 2007), Time Series Econometrics using Microfit 5, (Oxford University Press, 2009), The GVAR Handbook: Structure and Applications of a Macro Model of the Global Economy for Policy Analysis, edited with Filippo di Mauro, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Time Series and Panel Data Econometrics, (Oxford University Press, 2015).