Azhar Iqbal

Email: Azhar.Iqbal@wellsfargo.com


Azhar IqbalAzhar Iqbal is a director and conometrician 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, N.Y. 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. Sandeep Kaur is currently a Ph.D research scholar at the University School of Applied Management, Punjabi University (Patiala). She has obtained her Master’s degree of Commerce at the Guru Nanak Dev University in 2014. Her current research interests include quantitative research in E-Commerce, Consumer behaviour, especially in the area of Digital Payments and Mobile Payments. Recently, she published two papers in WOS indexed journals and one in Scopus indexed journal (Solid State Technology).




Papers Published in World Economics:


Characterizing Stagflation into Mild, Moderate and Severe Episodes

The study proposes a new framework to classify stagflation into mild, moderate, or severe episodes based on the magnitude and duration of high inflation and low-output growth. It uses the CPI and PCE deflators as inflation measures, real GDP as output growth measure, and a time-varying benchmark for growth and inflation to account for the changing nature of the US economy. The article identifies 13 episodes of stagflation from 1947 to Q1-2024, with five mild, four moderate, and four severe cases. The current episode (Q2–2021 to Q1-2024) is severe and the second-longest in history. The findings use Bloomberg’s consensus projections to estimate the end of the current stagflation episode by Q1–2024, and discuss the policy implications and lessons from past episodes.

Read Full Paper >


Monetary Policy Tightening and Economic Landing
Author: Azhar Iqbal

This article presents a new approach for estimating the optimal nominal interest rate and labels it the appropriate-FFR. The analysis suggests that the US Federal Reserve is behind the curve in the present cycle and also predicts a hard landing using both the FOMC and Blue Chip consensus forecasts. Given the historical accuracy of our method, we caution decision makers to consider the possibility of a hard landing in the near future.

Read Full Paper >


Diversity and Inclusion
Author: Azhar Iqbal

This study employs the natural unemployment rate as a benchmark to characterize the state of the US labor market by race and gender. In our analysis, we find that the COVID recession produced asymmetric economic damages to some segments of the population and that the pace of recovery from the recession is slower for some races and gender than for others. This pattern matches similar trends of asymmetric damage and recovery seen over the prior three business cycles. The Black labor market was affected most by recessions and experienced the slowest pace of recovery; in particular, Black women’s pace of recovery was the slowest among any race and gender. Of all segments examined over this 30-year period, only the Black labor market never achieved full employment, making the past three business cycles “recovery-less” experiences for Black Americans. This finding, that one race never achieved full employment, suggests that policymakers should incorporate “diversity and inclusion” into their efforts to confront recessionary periods, rather than the current tradition of one-policy-fits-all. Our work proposes a new policy goal of full employment for every race and gender, which we believe would be a start to ending the “recovery-less” experience for Blacks. Typically, policymakers rely on and respond to the aggregate economic numbers; however, we believe there must be policy tools specifically focused on the race/gender-defined labor markets. Our analysis suggests that a faster recovery in the Black labor market would boost the pace of national recovery and that focusing on the Black market would also help the aggregate market. As a result, incorporating the race and gender data would help to design policies to benefit all. In other words, full employment for every race and gender should be the policy goal going forward.

Read Full Paper >


Is Monetary Policy Aging?
Author: Azhar Iqbal

This article proposes a framework to quantify the magnitude of monetary stimulus offered during a recession. We estimate that, over the past 30 years, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) offered larger incentives and for a longer duration during a recession than in the past cycle. Furthermore, each recession drained the FOMC’s resources and left the Committee with ‘less ammunition’ to fight the next recession. Therefore, our work suggests that monetary policy is aging. To de-age monetary policy, we propose 4% as a long-term target for the nominal FFR. Some of the major benefits of our proposed framework include: helping market participants gauge magnitude of accommodation; anchoring market participants’ expectations; reduce time spent at the zero lower bound; lessen dependence on balance sheet expansion; ensure that the real federal funds target rate will be positive when the FOMC meets its interest rate and inflation targets.

Read Full Paper >