Professor Hashem Pesaran is the John Elliott Distinguished Chair in Economics and the Director of the University of Southern California (USC) Center for Applied Financial Economics.

Professor Pesaran has been a leading expert of applied econometrics and has published over 175 publications in leading journals and edited volumes in the areas of econometrics, empirical finance, quantitative analysis of financial markets, macroeconometric modeling, energy demand and the Middle East economies.

The main areas of his research include real-time applications of econometrics in the fields of business and government decision making, national and global macroeconometric modeling (GVAR), factor models, empirics of growth, econometric analysis of dynamic panels: unit root testing and cointegration in panel data models, econometric analysis of non-nested models, credit risk modeling.

Prof 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.

A former economist for the Central Bank of Iran, he has served as consultant to for many institutions around the world including the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Professor Pesaran received his BSc (First Class Honours) in Economics, Mathematic and Statistics at the University of Salford (England) and his PhD in Economics at Cambridge University. Currently, he is an emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, the John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California, and a Professorial 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.

http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003600