Mohamed Zahran
Associate Lecturer in Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences
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Biography
Mohamed Zahran joined the School of Economics as an Associate Lecturer in Economics. He is a Quantitative Economist specialising in Macroeconomics, International Macro-Finance, and Applied Econometrics. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA, UK), a Research Associate at the Economic Research Forum (ERF), and an experienced university educator. He holds a PhD in Economics from City, University of London and a Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice from City St George's, University of London.
His research examines how uncertainty, institutional credibility, and financing frictions shape the transmission of monetary, fiscal, financial, and external shocks. His work focuses on monetary-policy credibility, sovereign risk, exchange-rate dynamics, foreign-exchange constraints, remittances, external financing conditions, and international policy spillovers. Methodologically, he combines structural and reduced-form macroeconometrics, DSGE modelling, time-series analysis, macroeconomic forecasting, and the identification of monetary, fiscal, and external shocks.
Dr Zahran serves as a reviewer for the Bulletin of Economic Research and the International Journal of Emerging Markets. He has held visiting research positions at the University of Texas at Dallas in the United States and the University of Victoria in Canada, and has undertaken advanced training at the International Monetary Fund and the University of Oxford. He has taught macroeconomics, econometrics, quantitative methods, economic policy, and political economy at universities in the United Kingdom and Egypt.
Expertise Summary
Quantitative economist specialising in Macroeconomics, International Macro-Finance, and Applied Econometrics. Research expertise includes monetary and fiscal policy transmission, macroeconomic uncertainty, institutional credibility, sovereign risk, exchange-rate dynamics, foreign-exchange constraints, remittances, external financing conditions, and international policy spillovers. Methodological expertise includes structural and reduced-form macroeconometrics, DSGE modelling, Local Projections, Dynamic Factor Models, time-varying parameter and stochastic volatility models, time-series analysis, and macroeconomic forecasting.
Teaching Summary
My teaching interests include macroeconomic theory, financial economics, applied econometrics, economic policy, and the political economy of contemporary economic issues. I have taught across… read more
Research Summary
My current research examines how uncertainty, institutional credibility, foreign-exchange constraints, and financing frictions shape monetary and external-shock transmission. Ongoing projects study… read more
2023 拢3000 Research travel grant from City, University of London. 2023 Team Teaching Excellence Award at the Queen Mary Education Excellence Awards. 2019 Full PhD Scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Egypt. 2019 Full PhD Tu虉rkiye Scholarship in Istanbul from the government of Turkey, (declined).
2015 Full Masters scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Germany. 2015 拢14,415 full tuition waiver for M.Sc. in Economics at the University of East Anglia in Engand,(declined). 2013 Research grant from the Ford foundation at the American University in Cairo.
My teaching interests include macroeconomic theory, financial economics, applied econometrics, economic policy, and the political economy of contemporary economic issues. I have taught across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including:
- ECON4016 Macroeconomic Theory - MSc
- ECON3013 Advanced Financial Economics - BSc
- ECON2006 Applied Econometrics II - BSc
- ECON1051 Politics of Economics - BSc
- ECON1016 Current Economic Issues - BSc
My teaching approach emphasises analytical rigour, empirical application, policy relevance, and the integration of economic theory with contemporary evidence.
Current Research
My current research examines how uncertainty, institutional credibility, foreign-exchange constraints, and financing frictions shape monetary and external-shock transmission. Ongoing projects study endogenous remittance flows under foreign-currency shortages, the effects of monetary-policy duration on macroeconomic tail risk, inflation dynamics under weak nominal anchors, international monetary-policy spillovers, Treasury-financing uncertainty, and external-shock transmission in segmented open economies.
Past Research
My doctoral research examined the dynamics of macroeconomic uncertainty shocks and the role of external-debt-financed fiscal policy. It analysed how uncertainty interacts with fiscal financing choices, external debt, monetary conditions, and open-economy adjustment. This work established the foundations of my broader research programme on uncertainty, financing frictions, and monetary and fiscal policy transmission.
Future Research
The next phase of my research develops three interconnected strands on the identification and transmission of macroeconomic policy shocks.
The first develops a structural eigenmode estimator for impulse-response analysis. Rather than relying on generic statistical smoothing, the method uses a theory-guided function space derived from the solved dynamics of a New Keynesian model with financial amplification. Applied to US monetary transmission, the framework decomposes policy responses into fast-moving financial, delayed real-activity, and persistent nominal-credit components, while enabling joint inference on response shapes and structural parameters.
The second extends structural impulse-response matching into the time-frequency domain. Using wavelet-localised local projections and minimum-distance estimation, this research examines whether standard nominal rigidities and a state-invariant financial channel can account for the frequency-specific transmission of monetary-policy shocks across supply- and demand-driven inflation regimes.
The third develops an informationally robust approach to fiscal identification. It separates genuine policy innovations from the private information embedded in fiscal announcements, re-estimates fiscal multipliers under cleaner identification, and traces transmission through discount rates, term premia, financial conditions, and sovereign debt pricing.