Mohammad Reza Farzanegan

The Middle Class in Iran: Oil Rents, Modernisation and Political Development

Mohammad Farzanegan is researching this interconnection together with colleagues from the University of Tehran. While the project is about Iran, it can also be extended to other oil-rich economies. The idea is to explore the dynamic relationship between developments of the middle class in a rentier economy. Another ongoing research project deals with the response of income inequality to positive oil rents shocks in Iran along with its implications for the post-sanction period, which Farzanegan plans to continue working on it at CESifo. Finally, a research idea that he plans to develop during his visit is a further investigation of the effect of average national intelligence on the level of corruption, following up on a 2012 study by Niklas Potrafke.

Mr Farzanegan's research interests are in energy economics, political economy, public choice, development economics and empirical institutional economics.

Mohammad Farzanegan co-edited the volume, Economic Welfare and Inequality in Iran: Developments since the Revolution (with P. Alaedini, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He has published in journals such as Applied Economics Letters, the European Journal of Political Economy, Energy Economics and Economic Systems, among others.

Mr Farzanegan is Professor of Economics of the Middle East and Chair of the Research Group at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Marburg. He is a CESifo Research Network Affiliate, and member of the Economic Research Forum (Cairo), the Marburg Centre for Institutional Economics (MACIE), the Iranian Economic Association (IIEA), the Verein für Socialpolitik and the European Public Choice Society. He received the Alexander von Humboldt Georg Forster Research Fellowship for his postdoctoral project (2010–12); he earned his PhD from TU Dresden for a dissertation entitled: "Political Economy of Natural Resources and Governance in Iran: An Empirical Investigation".