Azhar Iqbal is a director and econometrician for Wells Fargo’s Corporate and Investment Bank. In this role, Azhar provides quantitative analysis to the Economics group and modeling and forecasting of macro and financial variables. He is based in New York, New York.
Before joining Wells Fargo in 2007, Azhar was an economist and course instructor at the Applied Economics Research Center at the University of Karachi in Pakistan, teaching econometrics, microeconomics, and urban economics.
Azhar received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Punjab and has three master’s degrees. He earned his master’s degree in economic forecasting from the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he also earned a Certificate of Graduate Study in economic forecasting. He also has master’s degrees in applied economics from the University of Karachi, and in econometrics and mathematics from the University of Punjab, Pakistan.
Azhar won the 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 NABE Contributed Paper Award as well as the 2010 and 2016 Edmund A. Mennis Contributed Paper Award for best papers from the National Association of Business Economics (NABE). A strong supporter of education, Azhar has taught a graduate course, Advanced Business and Economic Forecasting, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Azhar’s co-authored book, Economic and Business Forecasting: Analyzing and Interpreting Econometric Results, was published by Wiley in March 2014. His second book, Economic Modeling in the Post Great Recession Era, was published by Wiley in March 2017.
His interests focus on forecasting, time series, machine learning and big data, business cycles analysis, and macroeconomics. Azhar has presented research papers at the American Economic Association, Econometric Society meetings, the Panel Data Conference, and other international conferences. He has published over three dozen papers in the Canadian Journal of Economics, Global Economy Journal, Business Economics, Journal of Business Forecasting, and others listed in the Journal of Economic Literature. Azhar writes economic commentary/special reports which have been excerpted or republished in print media sources such as The Financial Times, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.