Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
LSE Department of International Development
LSE Center for Macroeconomics
MIT FutureTech Laboratory
PhD in Political Economy & Government, Harvard, 2017
PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT, 2011
I am an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the department of International Development of the London School of Economics, and also serve as a affiliate professor at the MIT FutureTech Lab. My research studies different long-run drivers of economic change, from technological breakthroughs such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the innovation activity of firms, transformations in the consumption patterns of households, and globalization.
From 2023 to 2026, I was a Research Economist (2023-2025) and then an Economic Research Advisor (2026) at the Research and Statistics department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 2018 to 2023, I was an Assistant Professor of economics and international studies at Boston College, holding the White Family assistant professorship chair between 2020 and 2023. I was the Peter B. Kenen Fellow in the International Economics Section at Princeton University (2024-2025), a Shoven/SIEPR Young Scholar at Stanford University (2021-2022), and a Cowles Foundation postdoctoral associate at the Yale University (2017-2018).
I completed a PhD degree at the Harvard economics department in 2017. Prior to that, I obtained a PhD degree at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where I worked on a number of applications of machine learning techniques in neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience. I received MSc and BSc degrees from the University of Tehran, Iran.
This webpage includes my recent economics research papers. To find out more about my current work and past research in machine learning and neuroscience, you can see my Google Scholar profile here: Google Scholar Profile.
September, 2026:
Our paper "Occupational Choice and the Intergenerational Mobility of Welfare" is now Revise-and-Resubmit at Journal of European Economic Association.
July, 2026:
Our paper "Creative Destruction through Innovation Bursts" is now conditionally accepted at Econometrica.
A new draft of our paper "AI, Scale, and Task-Based Theories of Automation" is now available.
A new draft of our paper "How Do Sectoral Shocks Shape Future GDP?" is now available.
A new draft of our paper "Capital-Skill Complementarity in Firms and in the Aggregate Economy" is now available.
May, 2026:
A new draft of our paper "Creative Destruction through Innovation Bursts" is now available.
Our paper "The Productivity Paradox in US Manufacturing: A Firm- and Industry-Level Perspective" is now published at the AEA P&P.
November, 2025:
A draft of our chapter "Wedges: A Microeconomic Perspective on Misallocation" for the Handbook of Development Economics is available.