👋! I am a PhD Economics Student at the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA.

Background:

I have a MPhil 🎓 in Economics from the University of Oxford, UK and a BSc 🎓 in Economics and Mathematics from LUMS, Pakistan.

In Pakistan, I have studied and worked in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. I worked at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi as a Lecturer of Economics during 2020-2021 and at PIDE (Pakistan Institute of Development Economics: https://pide.org.pk/), Islamabad as a research fellow during 2021-2024. I also worked with the Asian Development Bank as a consultant during Janurary-June 2024.

Research Interests 🔬:

My research interests lie in the following areas:

➜ Estimating monetary policy transmission effects using exogenous macroeconomic shocks in cross-country, panel data models.

➜ Understanding the international monetary system and optimal policy deisgn through the network structure of private and central/government banks.

➜ Heterogenous Agent New Keynesian Models (HANK) with Dispersal of Learning and Expectations.

Firstly, I use empirical macroeconomic tools such as reduced form VARs, structural VARs, bayesian VARS, local projections and dynamic panel models to estimate the transmission channels of monetary policy in both advanced and emerging economies. I have worked on papers which measure how monetary transmission effects vary based on the degree of central bank independence, inflation targeting regime status, around election cycles and other political economy factors.

Secondly, I am fascinated about the network structure of international and intra-national links across private banks and networks among central/federal banks of various nations, where the central nodes are large American banks and the US Federal Reserve System. Such network structures play a key role in the generation as well as amplification of global financial shocks. Hence, understanding this system is critical for effective global coordination of monetary policies for the management of global business cycle fluctuations.

I am also interested in optimal monetary policy design in heterogeneous expectation models, where expectations are diverse and dynamics are driven by the degree of convergence or divergence in the social learning dynamics.

Research Skills:

➜ I am proficient in many applied macro-econometrics/empirical macroeconomic tools including machine learning (neural networks and reinforcement learning).

➜ I can build, solve and calibrate small and medium-scale DSGE models using MATLAB, DYNARE and IRIS-Toolbox.

➜ I can code in R, MATLAB, Python, and STATA environments with advanced proficiency in R and MATLAB.