University of Washington · Department of Economics

Khashayar
Pourtaheri

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Washington, advised by Alan Griffith. I use causal inference to study how policies shape health and economic outcomes, and I design experiments to test whether LLM personas can predict how real people make decisions. My fields are applied microeconomics, health and labor economics, and behavioral economics and AI.

I studied engineering and then economics at Sharif University of Technology and business economics at Queen's University. I work as an economist at UW's CHOICE Institute and previously worked as a data scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

I am on the 2026–2027 economics job market. Job market paper: The Social Cost of Drug Decriminalization.