Murat Iyigun (born March 21, 1964) is an American and Turkish scholar and author in the field of the economics of family, economic development, political economy and cliometrics. He is a professor at the

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University of Co ...

Education

Murat Iyigun graduated with a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

in business administration from

Hacettepe University Hacettepe University is a leading state university in Ankara, Turkey. It was established on 8 July 1967. It is ranked first among the Turkish universities by URAP in 2021. The university has two main campuses. The first campus is in the old to ...

in 1985. He then completed a

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

in Finance and economics from

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

in 1991. He completed an A.M in Economics in 1992 from

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. Finally in 1995 he completed his PhD in economics from Brown. The title of his PhD thesis was ''Essays on Economic Mobility, Trade, Production and Extralegal Appropriation''.

Career

Upon graduating from Brown University in 1995, Murat Iyigun was hired by the

Federal Reserve Board The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, commonly known as the Federal Reserve Board, is the main governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve Banks and with helping implement the mon ...

, in Washington DC, making him the first Turkish citizen hired by the US Central Bank as a staff economist. In August 2000, he was appointed assistant professor at the

in Boulder. He became Associate professor in 2005, Professor in 2010 and appointed Calderwood Chair in 2014. Besides his academic activities he has held several editorial positions. From 2008 to 2011 he was a board member of the

European Journal of Political Economy The ''European Journal of Political Economy'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on economic phenomena, including collective decision making, political behavior, and the role of institutions. The editors-in-chief are To ...

. From 2010 to 2012 he was Associate Editor for the Journal of Mathematical Population Studies and, between 2014 and 2023, he was Co-editor of Journal of Demographic Economics. He is currently on the editorial boards of

Journal of Demographic Economics ''Journal of Demographic Economics'' (JODE) is a peer-reviewed academic journal at the intersection of demography and economics. It is published by Cambridge University Press and edited by the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the UCLo ...

and Journal of Economics, Management and Religion. Murat Iyigun is also Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Studies (IZA) in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

Germany and the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Between 2007 and 2010, he was a visiting scholar and a Research Affiliate at the

Center for International Development at Harvard University The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public ...

Publications

Professor Iyigun published papers in leading journals such as

American Economic Review The ''American Economic Review'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious and highly distinguished journals in the field of ec ...

Quarterly Journal of Economics ''The Quarterly Journal of Economics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Oxford University Press for the Harvard University Department of Economics. Its current editors-in-chief are Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan N ...

The Review of Economic Studies ''The Review of Economic Studies'' (also known as ''REStud'') is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering economics. It was established in 1933 by a group of economists based in Britain and the United States. The original editorial tea ...

Books

In 2015, Iyigun published a general interest book entitled ''War, Peace and Prosperity in the Name of God''. In this book Pr. Iyigun studies the impact of

monotheistic Monotheism is the belief that there is only one deity, an all-supreme being that is universally referred to as God. Cross, F.L.; Livingstone, E.A., eds. (1974). "Monotheism". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford ...

faith on socio-economic development of societies using

econometric Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics," '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8 ...

techniques. He demonstrates thanks to data that polities based on monotheistic faiths historically had larger territories and survived longer. On this basis, Pr. Iyigun argues that monotheism was a factor of sociopolitical stability domestically but a source of conflicts & territorial conquest internationally.

Music

Murat Iyigun is also a musician, band leader and guitar player. His band, the Custom Shop - Band, plays

rock Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

and R&B and performs regularly in

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

and the

Front Range The Front Range is a mountain range of the Southern Rocky Mountains of North America located in the central portion of the U.S. State of Colorado, and southeastern portion of the U.S. State of Wyoming. It is the first mountain range encountere ...

References

External links

Murat Iyigun's homepage

Homepage of the Journal of Demographic Economics

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iyigun, Murat Turkish emigrants to the United States Turkish economists Living people 1964 births