M. Hashem Pesaran is the John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, and a Professorial Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He also holds the directorship of USC Dornsife Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Centre for Applied Financial Economics at USC. Previously, he was head of the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran and the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Iran. He has also been a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Applied Econometrics Program at UCLA, and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna. He was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Salford, the University of Goethe, Frankfurt, Maastricht University, and University of Economics in Prague. He is the recipient of the 1990 George Sell Prize from The Institute of Petroleum, London, the 1992 Royal Economic Society Prize for the best article published in The Economic Journal for the years 1990 and 1991, the joint recipient of the Econometric Reviews Best Paper Award 2002-2004, and the joint recipient of the Best Paper Award 2004-2005 in the International Journal of Forecasting. Dr Pesaran was the founding editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics (1986-2014), and a co-developer of Microfit, an econometric software package published by Oxford University Press. He was named one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014” by Thomson Reuters in 2014. He has over 200 publications published in leading scientific journals and edited volumes in the areas of econometrics, empirical finance and macroeconomics and the Iranian economy. He is an expert in the economics of oil and the middle-east and his research has been cited almost 50K times according to Google Scholar. He holds a PhD degree in economics from Cambridge University. 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.

Keynote lecture title: Oil Prices and the Global Economy: Is It Different This Time Around? [paper] [slides]