My PhD defence, 14 July 2009
April 2006 - 14 July 2009: I defended my PhD dissertation "
Political economy of natural resources and governance in Iran: an empirical investigation" at the Faculty of Business & Economics of TU Dresden.
The photos and films (thanks to Mehran) can be downloaded at the following link:
http://ifile.it/4rsblo1 (1: click
Request Download Ticket and then click on download)
Iran Presidential Election
Information can
be seen here.
End of Ahmadinejad populism is coming!
my working paper on "Macroeconomics of populism in Iran" can be read here.Abstract:
This paper uses the Dornbusch and Edwards (1990) analytical framework to investigate the
macroeconomic populism in Iran under the Ahmadinejad government. My thesis endeavours
to place the government of Ahmadinejad in a populist context and forecasts its fall mainly due
to macroeconomic instabilities. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how closely
Ahmadinejad’s government follows the model of Dornbusch and Edwards (1990).
=========================================================
12 June 2009 will show the validity of the predictions of D&E model for the case of Iran!
In press: Illegal trade in the Iranian economy: Evidence from a structural model
" Illegal trade in the Iranian economy: evidence from a structural equation model" is in press in
European Journal of Political Economy.
The working paper version of this work can be find in the following links:
SSRNERF
Corruption in Russia
You can read an interesting artcile from The Economist on corruption in Russia
Here.
" The effects of oil price shocks on the Iranian economy"
My new joint-paper on " The effects of oil price shocks on the Iranian economy" published in Energy Economics. See it here
Alef website filtered!
The Alef online news agency which disclosed and followed the scandel of Ali Kordan filtered by the government of Iran today.
What we learn from this outcome? Role of media on corruption depends on prior criteria such as quality of other institutions in a country. Rule of law is one of them.
University of Oxford Announcement
University of Oxford issued a statement about the claimed PhD of Iran Interior Minister, Ali Kordan. Ali Kordan a new appointed Minster claimed that he has a PhD in Law from Oxford University. This claim undermined by an online news agency (Alef.ir) which manage by Tavakoli a parliament member in Iran. In response to these critiques, Ali Larijani, the president of Iranian parliament has asked the education commission to investigate the validity of Kordan's PhD.
Here you can see the response of Oxford Uni.
Corruption in Education
Special opportunity for those who have some criminal background and skills. You can get your degree in a moment! This website offers such serviuces :
http://www.fast-degrees-online.com/
PhD certificate of New Iran Interior Minister
Recently Iranian Parliament voted for suggested candidate for Interior Minister by President Ahmadinejad. Alef News Agency has initiated a hot debate about the validity of Mr. Ali Kordan PhD certificate from the University of Oxford. You can also see here this unusual certificate. I quote the idea of one of my English friend about this PhD certificate.
"...OK, regarding your query on that certificate - I see that somebody has already pointed out the unusual (i.e. incorrect) spacing between some of the words and the (in their opinion) incorrect use of commas throughout the document. I agree with the correction of "intitle" (it should be "entitle") and that its positioning is odd. In my opinion, there should be a comma after "Bryant" in that first paragraph, though it seems to me that the first paragraph does not read correctly anyway. If it was written: "According to the suggestion and the attestation of Professor Bryant, a faculty of the college of law of Oxford University..." it would not make sense anyway, as it implies that Professor Bryant IS a faculty of the college, while in fact he is a MEMBER of the faculty. In short, it all seems a bit of a mess.
Having said that, I have never seen a PhD certificate from the University of Oxford and I can imagine that it is possible that there are some unusual conventions (!) and it is not impossible that there might be archaic spellings and other random irregularities!! So I would not be able to claim that this is a fake, but it certainly looks suspicious.
I can't understand why they didn't just edit a scanned certificate of copy of a certificate in Photoshop - this would have been a whole lot more convincing!"
