Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Asim Ijaz Khwaja (Urdu: عاصم اعجاز خواجہ) is a British-born Pakistani-American economist who serves as the Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and is the director of the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University. ^[1]

Asim was born to a Pakistani family in London, United Kingdom. ^[1] He was raised in the United Kingdom before moving to Kano, Nigeria, where he lived for eight years. He also lived in Lahore, Pakistan, for eight years and attended Aitchison College. He moved to Cambridge, United States for higher education in 1991. Asim got a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics with computer science from MIT in 1995. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard in 2001.^{[2] [3]}

Asim joined Harvard University as an assistant professor in June 2001. He is the first person of Pakistani descent hired by Harvard as a professor.^[4] In October of 2005, Asim released RISE-PAK, a searchable database for earthquake relief in Pakistan.^[5] He was promoted to associate professor at Harvard in June 2006 and professor in January 2010. He has also served as a visiting faculty member at Yale University's Economic Growth Center (2005) and at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. His areas of interest include development economics, corporate finance, education, political economy, institutions, mechanism design/contract theory and industrial organization. ^[1][3]

He is the co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and also serves as co-director of Harvard Evidence for Policy Design.^[6]

Asim is a citizen of Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is married to Sehr Jalal^[7] and has three children. He is interested in chaos and complexity theory.^[3]

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