He completed his higher education first in the United States and then in France.
[4] After that he received his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Université Paris 1 on Les modes de coordination et les institutions: vers une approche dynamique.
[6][7][8] In his book The Political Economy of Predation (2016), which stands at the crossroad of Public Choice and New institutional Economics, Vahabi relies on the concept of predation to revisit the analysis of the genesis of the state, states conflict and the transition from autocracy to democracy.
[9] His subsequent work, Destructive Coordination, Anfal and Islamic Political Capitalism: A New Reading of Contemporary Iran (2023), is a study of Islamic public finance that describes how ideology and politics enable institutions to emerge that contribute to perpetual crises.
With focus on Iran, and a specific institution, Anfal.