I am an applied economist working at the intersection of macroeconomics, public economics, and political economy. My work asks how policies and shocks travel through an economy, from aggregate outcomes down to individual households and firms, and why the same shock can produce very different outcomes depending on firm- or individual-level characteristics, institutions, and beliefs. 

My research follows three connected strands. The first is policy transmission: how fiscal and monetary policy affect the macroeconomy, including fiscal multipliers, the composition of taxation, and monetary policy pass-through. The second is firms and markets: how firms respond to tax and trade policy, including stock market reactions to tariff announcements, and how firm location, agglomeration, foreign direct investment, and venture capital ecosystems shape regional economic activity. The third is how economic experiences shape people: how recessions, policy shocks, terrorism, and labor market institutions influence preferences, political polarization, populism, hiring decisions, and the life chances of disadvantaged groups. Across these strands, I combine modern causal identification (local projections, difference-in-differences, shift-share and narrative approaches) with incentivized experiments, administrative register data, text-based measurement, and spatial econometrics. 

I am a Professor of Economics at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and a Research Associate at CAMA (Australian National University). I hold visiting appointments at Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Ulm, and TU Dresden, and have held short-term research visits at the KOF Institute (Switzerland), NHH Bergen (Norway), the Paris School of Economics (France), University College Dublin (Ireland), UA Barcelona and the University of Granada (Spain). Before joining Zayed, I spent seven years at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. I received my B.Sc. from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and my M.S. and Ph.D. in Economics from Louisiana State University. 

I have taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, public economics, monetary economics, and econometrics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the USA, New Zealand, Germany, Oman, and the UAE.