Iranian thinker
Mohammad Hashem Pesaran
Mohammad Hashem PesaranEconometricsBritish-Iranianb. 1946
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Mohammad Hashem Pesaran is a British-Iranian economist and econometrician renowned worldwide for foundational work on panel data econometrics, time series analysis, and economic forecasting. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge and holds the John Elliott Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California (USC).
Mohammad Hashem Pesaran was born on 30 March 1946 in Shiraz. He attended Nemazi School in Shiraz and, in November 1964, traveled to England on a scholarship from Bank Markazi Iran (the Central Bank of Iran) to continue his studies. He earned a BSc in economics from the University of Salford and later completed his PhD in economics at the University of Cambridge under D. G. Champernowne.
He served for a time as head of the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran and as under-secretary of the Iranian Ministry of Education. He then spent many years as a professor of economics and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he is now Professor Emeritus and a lifetime honorary fellow of Trinity College. Since 2005 he has held the John Elliott Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California (USC), where he also directs the USC Dornsife Center for Applied Financial Economics. He also previously served as professor of economics and director of the Applied Econometrics Program at UCLA.
Pesaran ranks among the most influential figures in modern econometrics. Together with collaborators, he developed methods for testing unit roots in panel data—including the well-known Im-Pesaran-Shin test—and an approach to modeling cross-sectional dependence among economic units known as the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics and a co-developer of the Microfit econometric software package; his research on economic forecasting, empirical macroeconomics, and time series analysis has had wide influence on econometric research worldwide.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and has received honorary doctorates from the University of Salford (1993) and Goethe University Frankfurt (2008). Among his other honors is the Royal Economic Society's prize for the best article published in The Economic Journal (1992).