About the Director
Professor Rajeev Dhawan wears a dual hat as holder of the Zwerner Chair of Economic Forecasting and as Director of the Economic Forecasting Center at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. As director of one of the country’s premiere forecasting centers, Dhawan develops forecasts for the U.S., Southeast regional and local metro Atlanta economies. These forecasts are regularly published and presented to business executives and the media at the Center’s popular, well-respected quarterly forecasting conferences.
Dr. Dhawan currently serves as the chair of the advisory committee for regional growth for the Atlanta Regional Commission and is also a member of the Georgia Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors since early 2004. He serves on the board of Public Broadcasting Atlanta since 2005, and is a past board member of Association for University Business and Economic Research (AUBER) from 2004 to 2006, and for National Association for Business Economics (NABE) from 2009 to 2011. Dhawan is a frequent panelist for the Global Interdependence Center and he is a regular guest lecturer for the FFIEC’s Conference for Large, Complex Financial Institutions program at the FDIC’s Arlington headquarters.
Awards
Dhawan has received several awards for his forecasting accuracy, including FIVE Pulsenomics Crystal Ball awards for accurate U.S. home price predictions from 2013 to 2018. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has recognized him for his forecasting excellence for THREE years in a row (real GDP in 2016, inflation in 2017, and private inventories in 2018). In 2005, he was named the most accurate forecaster for GDP by Bloomberg News. The Bank One Economic Outlook Center at Arizona State University in 2003 named him the most accurate forecaster for US employment. He has also been listed among Georgia Trend magazine’s “100 Most Influential Georgians” for three consecutive years. Dhawan is known for his ability to articulate complex economic issues in terms that are extremely relevant to the business community. He is frequently called upon to brief the boards of private companies and regularly gives keynote speeches at various industry and trade group events.
International Speaker
A sought-after international speaker, Dhawan has presented at conferences in Abu Dhabi, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Dubai, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherland, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K. and across the U.S. As a consultant, he has been commissioned to prepare economic impact reports, home price forecast models, and provide public policy recommendations. He has served as an advisor to several local and state government agencies and numerous publicly-held companies. These companies include Coca-Cola, Georgia Power, Morgan Keegan and Turner Broadcasting, among others. Dhawan has directed impact analysis studies for Amgen, Northrop Grumman, LA Development Corporation, the California Automobile Import Alliance and the California Energy Commission.
Media Appearances
Frequently contacted by the media for his economic analysis and expertise, Dhawan often appears on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, the Bloomberg Report and the Atlanta affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. He is sought after for many national and regional publications, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Investor’s Business Daily, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and national wire services including Associated Press, Reuters and the Dow Jones News Service.
Dhawan regularly contributes his U.S. forecast to well-regarded surveys such as Blue Chip Economic Indicators, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Livingston Survey, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Professional Forecaster’s Survey, National Association of Business Economists Outlook Survey, Wall Street Journal’s Economist Survey, Pulsenomics Home Price Expectations Survey and a number of others.
Academic Research
Dhawan’s academic research analyzes U.S. business cycles with a special emphasis on the role of credit markets on growth and survival of small firms. His international industry comparison study examined factors that enabled Toyota to dominate not only U.S. companies, but also its Japanese counterparts. His industrial organization work quantifies the contribution of organizational and technological factors in improving firm efficiency. His other areas of specialization include small business strategy and entrepreneurship, energy economics, and econometric modeling.
In his recent work, Dhawan has quantified the role and importance of oil prices in U.S. business cycle fluctuations. His research has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Management Science, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Review of Economic Dynamics, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Productivity Analysis, and the International Journal of the Economics of Business. He is also the author of Firm Size, Financial Intermediation and Business Cycles which explores the effect of liquidity constraints on U.S. economic performance.
Earlier Career
Prior to joining Georgia State University in the fall of 2000, he served as director of Econometric Forecasting at the Business Forecasting Project of the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. In this role, Dhawan authored quarterly forecasts for the U.S. and California economies, directed economic impact studies and taught in the business school. He has also taught economics, logistics and statistics courses at Pepperdine University and California State University at Long Beach.
Dhawan earned a B.A. in Economics, with honors, from St. Stephen’s College in India, a Master’s degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University in India, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California Los Angeles.