About
Danial Lashkari is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Development and also serves as an affiliate professor at the MIT FutureTech Lab. His research studies different long-run drivers of economic change, from technological breakthroughs such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the innovation activity of firms, transformations in the consumption patterns of households, and globalisation.
From 2023 to 2026, Danial was a Research Economist (2023-2025) and then an Economic Research Advisor (2026) at the Research and Statistics Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 2018 to 2023, he was an Assistant Professor of economics and international studies at Boston College, holding the White Family assistant professorship chair between 2020 and 2023. He was the Peter B. Kenen Fellow in the International Economics Section at Princeton University (2024-2025), a Shoven/SIEPR Young Scholar at Stanford University (2021-2022), and a Cowles Foundation postdoctoral associate at Yale University (2017-2018).
Danial completed a PhD degree at the Harvard Economics Department in 2017. Before that, he earned a PhD from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he worked on applications of machine learning techniques in neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience. He received MSc and BSc degrees from the University of Tehran, Iran.
Selected publications:
Giuseppe Berlingieri, Maarten De Ridder, Danial Lashkari, and Davide Rigo.
"Creative Destruction through Innovation Bursts".
Econometrica Conditionally Accepted (CEP DP 2095).
Lauren Bergquist, Danial Lashkari, and Eric Verhoogen.
"Wedges: A Microeconomic Perspective on Misallocation".
Handbook of Development Economics forthcoming.
Marco Errico and Danial Lashkari.
"Aggregation and the Estimation of Quality Change: Application to US Import Prices".
Quarterly Journal of Economics 2025, 140 (4) 3283–-3335.
Danial Lashkari, Arthur Bauer, and Jocelyn Boussard.
"Information Technology and Returns to Scale".
American Economic Review 2024, 114 (6) 1769–-1815.
Xavier Jaravel and Danial Lashkari.
"Measuring Growth in Consumer Welfare with Income-Dependent Preferences."
Quarterly Journal of Economics 2024, 139 (1) 477--532.
Diego Comin, Danial Lashkari, and Martí Mestieri.
“Structural Change with Long-run Income and Price Effects.”
Econometrica 2021, 89 (1) 311–-374.
Teaching
DV490 - Economic Development Policy I
DV472- Capitalism and Development: a history