Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani is a professor of economics at Virginia Tech and one of the leading specialists on Iranian political economy, poverty, inequality, and the economic impact of sanctions. He is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

His research focuses on labor markets, household welfare, and the distributional effects of economic policy in Iran and the wider Middle East. He has written extensively on how sanctions affect Iranian households and the broader economy, arguing that sanctions disproportionately harm ordinary Iranians while strengthening the regime's control over remaining resources — a position that aligns with the Iranian government's preferred framing on sanctions but that Salehi-Isfahani grounds in empirical household-level data.

He is co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (2023, Stanford University Press) with Vali Nasr, Narges Bajoghli, and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj. The book's central argument — that maximum-pressure sanctions are counterproductive and harm civilians without achieving regime change — became a significant intervention in the US sanctions policy debate. One of the original co-authors listed earlier in the project, Ali Vaez, was subsequently identified as a participant in the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a covert Iranian Foreign Ministry influence operation, adding contested context to the project's analytical framing.

Salehi-Isfahani maintains a blog, Iran Economics, that provides regular quantitative analysis of Iranian economic data and is widely cited by Iran analysts.