Mark Zandi is an Iranian American economist and co-founder of Moody's

Moody's

Moody's Corporation is the holding company for Moody's Analytics and Moody's Investors Service, a credit rating agency which performs international financial research and analysis on commercial and government entities. The company also ranks the credit-worthiness of borrowers using a standardized...

 Economy.com, a widely-cited source of economic analysis.. Moody's Economy.com is part of Moody's Analytics

Moody's Analytics

Moody’s Analytics provides capital markets and risk management professionals with credit analysis, economic research, financial risk management software, and advisory services...

. Prior to founding Economy.com, Zandi was a regional economist at Chase Econometrics.

He was born in Atlanta, Georgia of Iranian descent and grew up in Radnor, Pennsylvania. He attended Upper Merion High School where he earned his diploma. Zandi received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His surname of "Zandi" comes from the Zand dynasty

Zand dynasty

The Zand dynasty ruled southern and central Iran in the 18th century.- Karim Khan Zand :The dynasty was founded by Karim Khan, chief of the Zand tribe which was Lur or Lak deportees. Modern scholarships such as Wadie Jwaideh suggested his Kurdishness. He became one of Nader Shah's generals...

 (formally known as the Zandieh dynasty), which ruled southern and south-central Iran (1750–1794) in the eighteenth century.

Zandi's analysis of the impact of an economic stimulus package on the United States economy was cited by Christina Romer

Christina Romer

Christina D. Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration...

 and Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein is an American economist who previously served as Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden in the Obama Administration. In early 2009 Bernstein was named Executive Director of the newly formed White House Middle Class Working Families Task Force. He...

 in their report on President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

's proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Zandi uses old-style Keynesian models in the spirit of Nobel Prize winner Lawrence Klein

Lawrence Klein

Lawrence Robert Klein is an American economist. For his work in creating computer models to forecast economic trends in the field of econometrics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1980...

. The utility of such models to gauge the impact of fiscal stimulus has been questioned by Harvard economist Robert J. Barro.

External links

• Mark Zandi's homepage at Economy.com
• Economy.com, a subsidiary of Moody's Analytics
  Moody's Analytics
  Moody’s Analytics provides capital markets and risk management professionals with credit analysis, economic research, financial risk management software, and advisory services...
  
  
• Review of Zandi's book Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis from The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...