Iran's Economy: Challenges and Opportunities

Friday, February 28, 2014

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A Lecture in Persian by Hashem Pesaran (USC and University of Cambridge)

A Lecture in Persian by Hashem Pesaran, USC and University of Cambridge. Part of the UCLA CNES and Program of Iranian Studies Bilingual Lecture Series.

 

Dr. M. Hashem Pesaran is the John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics and professor of economics at USC Dornsife, and the director of the Centre in Applied Financial Economics at USC. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, and an emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University, where he has been since 1979.

Dr. Pesaran was born in Shiraz, Iran. He received a scholarship from Bank Markazi Iran to study in England where he received his First Class Honours (B.S.c.) in economics, mathematics and statistics at the University of Salford (England) and his Ph.D. in economics at Cambridge University. Prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he headed the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran and served as Under-Secretary of the Iranian Ministry of Education.

Pesaran’s early work focused on the problem of model selection and hypothesis testing, in particular where the hypotheses under consideration are separate or non-nested. 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, and 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.

Dr. Pesaran is a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society and the Journal of Econometrics. He has honorary degrees from the University of Salford, the University of Goethe, Frankfurt, and Maastricht University. He has received the George Sell Prize and the Royal Economic Society Prize, the best paper papers from Econometrics Reviews and International Journal of Forecasting. He has more than 190 publications in leading scientific journals and edited volumes in the areas of econometrics, empirical finance and macroeconomics and the Iranian economy. Dr. Pesaran is the founding editor of The Journal of Applied Econometrics, and a co-developer of Microfit, an econometric software package published by Oxford University Press.

He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Economic Research Forum for Arab Countries and of 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.

He is currently the President of the International Iranian Economic Association, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Applied Econometrics.


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Duration: 1:29:35

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