Hadi Salehi Esfahani is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as the Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies during 2009-2011 and 2017-2020. He also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, during 2006-2022. He is a founding member and Research Fellow of the Economic Research Forum (ERF), where he served as a member of Board of Trustees and Advisory Committee of ERF. He has been a member of Middle East Economic Association, and has served at its Executive Secretary, 2004-2006, and President, January 2007-2009. He has worked for the World Bank as a policy research economist and as a consultant. He has received his B.Sc. in engineering from Tehran University and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. His theoretical and empirical research is in the field of political economy of development, focusing on the Middle East and North Africa region. He has published numerous articles on the role of politics and governance in fiscal, trade, labor, and regulatory policy formation.