A message from the Head

Happy New Year and welcome back!

As many of you know we have just completed a fantastic round of staff recruitment. We should all be very pleased with the outcome. This is a continuation of the excellent recruitment we have done over the last few years.

The reason we are so successful, I believe, is because the department has put in such a large effort, and I would like to thank each one of you for your time and efforts.

We had around 600 applications for researcher positions and interviewed 60 of those applicants. For each of the four available positions, we had four fly-outs. I’m convinced casting a wide net to hire has been an important part of our success.

It is a lot of work, but it is also an opportunity.  It’s a privilege that we get to meet and listen to some of the brightest young researchers in the world. Their sharing of research with us is one of the highlights of our year.  Thanks especially to the hiring committee and to our professional staff team for managing over 15 fly-outs.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Alexandr Haas,  Wanying (Kate) Huang, Santiago Hermo, and Lisa Botbol (in order of acceptance) to the Department of Economics at Monash Business School.

The other big current event is of course the start of our teaching period for the year.  It is clear that we are in a time of transition, and change always arrives with some friction.

We are in continuous constructive discussions with faculty  and university management to improve areas including (but not limited to) timetabling and well-suited teaching spaces for our new workshop delivery model.  However, let’s keep focused on the long run and on opportunities for better teaching and improved learning from interactive workshops.

It is my firm belief that we will look back on the current transition costs as a small price to pay relative to the benefits.

Dear colleagues,

We are nearing the end of the year, and what great news to end it on. I couldn’t be more pleased with our recent Australian Research Centre (ARC) grant success. Huge congratulations to Dr Quinyuan Du, Professor Lata Gangadharan, Professor Erte Xiao and Professor Yves Zenou. Monash Business School Economics faculty received one-third of all Discovery Project grants this year. Our friends in Econometrics (EBS) and the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) also had grant success. It is very encouraging to see the number of both applicants and recipients of ARC grants from the department this year, given that the success rate in general for Economics from recent years has been very low. This is an indication that we should keep applying for grants, and it will pay off despite the recent headwinds for economics grants nationally. Given how important grants are for our research and also for our reputation within the university, this is very positive and hopeful. I hope we can all celebrate this success together.

Looking to the year ahead, one major change concerns our teaching, and this development is already taking shape. As all of you know, we will be moving towards workshops as the norm, and away from the system of lectures / seminars. Many students prefer recorded lectures only as they offer the choice of going back to enable learning, and we have seen that in diminished in-person lecture attendance.  Of course, we also learned a lot about effective online materials during the pandemic and we need to continue to invest in quality online material with the support of our educational designers and learning and teaching committee.

In-person teaching is far from disappearing, however. On the contrary, we will have more interaction with students through a workshop model that is more interactive for face-to-face time.  One simple model is to edit and update existing recorded lectures to get started with the online component, then in a two-hour workshop (a) spend half an hour reinforcing main points, taking questions, and applying to current events (b) half an hour of small group discussion or collaborative problem-solving and (c)  an hour of whatever is currently covered in the tutorial. While that skips past many issues and details (such as ensuring students come to class prepared), the point is that a transition does not require wholesale reinvention of our already very high-quality teaching from day one. Rather, let’s get started down a simple transition, learn as we go, and continuously innovate and improve.

Based on feedback from those who have moved to workshops already, I suspect most people will thrive much more in a student-focused environment where our job will be to summarise, answer questions and instigate problem-solving, discussions and debate. The aim is to have better student experiences, better learning outcomes, and more job satisfaction once teaching moves away from traditional lecturing into more interactive workshops. I think this gives us a real opportunity to enjoy the teaching more once we have made the transition. The aim is for us to have mostly made the transition by the end of 2025. I encourage everyone to be curious, and I look forward to engaging with you all on this journey of change. That said, I am keenly aware that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. So, Jaai and I will be meeting individually with each of you to better understand the challenges you face, to gather ideas to be shared, and to learn what support you need.

As discussed in the last department meeting, we are also looking to restructure the research groups to tie them more closely to the research committee and improve our mentoring. In the new model, the research groups would have much more significant resources to spend as they vote on seminars, workshops, visitors, data, etc. Each group will also decide individually how they want mentoring to be carried out. They will also be much more involved in the screening of new applicants. We want to give them more autonomy, more authority and more responsibility.

Finally, a top priority for research suggested in our recent external review was to improve and strengthen our macroeconomics group. This is also an independent priority of the Dean. We have been investing a lot of effort into macro recruiting, and I think and hope it is likely we will have good news on this by the end of the usual first-quarter job cycle in economics.

With this, I would like to thank everyone for their hard work and enthusiasm this year.  The department is fundamentally in fantastic shape, and our trajectory is clearly still up with so many wonderful new staff. Let’s all work together to make 2024 even better.

Dear colleagues,

On Aug 22, we will gather to remember and honour our colleague and friend Prof Klaus Abbink.   The date has been chosen so that members of his family can attend.

Klaus will be missed, and he will not be forgotten. Klaus was devoted to the students, especially in his experimental economics class and in the PhD milestones to which he contributed tirelessly. So, it is fitting we will be creating a student scholarship in his honour.

Despite that tragic start to the year, it is great to now welcome everyone back to the department after a well-earned semester break. Over the next few months, I also look forward to welcoming new colleagues Dan McGee, Filip Premik, Maxime Gravoueille, Moshe Hazan, and Ricardo Dahis.  In addition to our very successful round of hires earlier in the year, we are now looking to recruit a junior position for Clayton campus.

I would like to spend a moment to reflect on the recent Department external review.

The executive summary commented on the dramatic improvement in the quality of research in teaching over the last ten years and noted that morale within the Department was high, with there being no obvious retention issues. The strong sense of inclusion among academic staff was also commented upon.

I’m delighted the panel saw the wonderful story here at Monash Economics. People have worked very hard to make this a great place. It’s not just the metrics, though the metrics are very strong.

For example, we have the highest student satisfaction in the faculty and the faculty has the highest in the university. Also, on almost every international ranking we are now in the top 50 research departments worldwide. We are no longer just another Australian department, but a department on the world stage.

I’m particularly pleased with the panel’s positive view on us as a group of colleagues. This is indicated, for example, by the “strong sense of inclusion” identified in the summary and by the comment elsewhere that “There is a strong culture in the Department -- it is a happy department.”

A happy and high performing department, that’s what we all want, and that’s what the review team saw here. So, congratulations everyone; you should all be proud of what we have accomplished together!

This feels fantastic. The good thing is the baseline about ten years ago was pretty good already, and we’ve come a very long way since then.

Yet there is still work to be done. We need to improve mentoring and further strengthen collegiality in the department. It is important that we help each other and work even better together. Since the pandemic there is a lot of working from home, but we also need to ensure a vibrant workplace atmosphere where we interact and learn from each other. We also need to work on having a bigger voice and more impact on Australian policy issues.

Restructured research groups will play a key role in the next steps.  These will have more responsibility, and decision-making, and resources to host their own seminars, workshops, and visitors.

We will better align the research group structure with the Department research committee to streamline and improve communication and sharing of ideas further. And each group will have their own mentoring program. I encourage you all to explore and be creative in this area and to try out new things.

Dear colleagues,

Ordinarily, at this time of year it is great to see all the students back on campus for the first semester and to interact with colleagues, discussing research and teaching, making plans for the year ahead. While this still holds true, these pleasures are overshadowed by the passing of our colleague and friend Professor Klaus Abbink. We received this news with deep sadness. Klaus will be greatly missed.

Many years ago, I was told by my department chair at the time that to build a great department you have to focus on three main things: recruit top quality people, manage so they have the time and resources to do great work, and retain them. If we do these, everything else for success follows. The new QS subject ranking last week put us at #1 in Australia and #34 in the world in economics and econometrics. Since this ranking includes both performance metrics and reputation metrics for both research and education, this is an indicator that our successes are being noticed.

We have just completed an unprecedented round of recruitment which has been very successful. It is with great pleasure that we welcome Professor Moshe Hazan. He fills this very important role in Macroeconomics. This is an area where we aim to make further investments, especially given that Macroeconomics is one of a Dean’s priority for engagement and impact investments.

Dr Maxime Gravouille (PSE), Dr Filip Premik (Minnesota) and Dr Ricardo Dahis (Northwestern) have all accepted positions with us. Their research will help strengthen several diverse areas such as public, labour, industrial organisation, development, political economy, and environmental. I’m very optimistic about these hires as they all bring new capabilities to the department while also fitting very well existing strengths.

With Rigissa Megalokonomou and Q.A. Do, who commenced earlier this year, this is a simply fantastic year for new colleagues.

In other news, Michelle Rendall, Stephen King and Mark Crosby have formed a working party engagement and impact strategy, coordination with Sascha Becker as Deputy Head. Also, a refresh of the Research group structure is under consideration. I hope to increase their decision making and financial resources this year. Finally, the new executive team is off to a strong start. I wish them, and all of you, the best in your endeavours.

Dear colleagues,

As we approach the end of the year I would first and foremost I would like to extend a big thank you to the leadership team that is now winding up.

Everybody has done truly a wonderful job. And I am very much looking forward to working with the new team, and I'm grateful to them for stepping up for these often under-appreciated but vital roles.

As our recent department review showed, the department is on a great trajectory. It is remarkable that the previous review, 13 years ago, stated that we “ranked towards the bottom of the Go8 departments in terms of high quality research outputs”.

Look where we are now. By almost any metric, we are now in the absolute top one or two in Australia and clearly in the top fifty internationally in research.  While education rankings are not available, I’d be very surprised if we don’t compare equally well there; we certainly do within the university.

We owe a lot of that to the leadership of those who have been in Executive roles previously. I want to keep improving in all dimensions, and to improve in a way that makes people feel better off.

That requires always asking "why are we doing it this way". I want the new Executive committee to keep asking "why this way?” and making improvements as a result.  This job is never really done, because new opportunities always emerge as you try new things.

Some areas are still in the midst of big changes. The PhD program has huge opportunities and also challenges.

For example, our new funded pre-PhD model will be coming online next year as well as a new PhD coursework model, and the university is likely to fundamentally change the financial rules so that we can offer our own tuition scholarships for PhD.

Teaching delivery is also in a period of significant change. With the pandemic, new technologies and new student demands have emerged. Our future has to be focused on delivering interactive and engaged learning experiences for students.

Other areas need fine-tuning, not wholesale change.  For example, our curriculum has been through a massive overhaul the past 3 years.

Now is the time to consolidate the gains.  Research is also going extremely well, but we can always do a better job of mentoring, career development, and supporting each other.

Finally, as we go into hiring season, I look forward to recruiting and meeting new colleagues. My wish for 2023 is that we all start enjoying each other’s company once again by fully returning to campus.

The sense of community in the department is so important. Let’s not forget each other, let’s work towards a thriving academic community and more intellectual exchanges in 2023.

Many thanks for all your hard work and contributions this year. Wishing you all joyful holidays ahead.

Dear colleagues,

Congratulations again to newly promoted Prof Zhijun Chen and Associate Professors Laura Puzello and Paulo Santos.

Welcome in advance to Dr Rigissa Megalokonomou who will be joining as Associate Professor in early 2023, and congratulations also on her forthcoming AER publication entitled ‘Human Capital Depreciation’.

It is also great news that Dr Quoc-anh Do is joining us in January next year.

Also, a very warm welcome back to Professor Stephen King, our former dean and department colleague, into a part-time practice appointment.

Stephen never really left, since he has been a very engaged adjunct professor, but it's great to have him officially back on staff.

I am optimistic there will also be good news soon on the macroeconomics recruitment front, and perhaps exceptionally good news, but we will know in the fullness of time.

Dear colleagues,

As you know, the Department of Economics is on a fantastic trajectory in research, education, and financial performance.

The COVID-delayed external review in November provides an excellent opportunity for us to reflect as a department on the next steps. That means continuing improvement in the areas where we are already strong, as well as broadening our areas of excellence such as active learning, research impact, external engagement and campus life.

To ensure everyone's voice is heard, the retreat will include small break-out group discussions. Not everyone will agree on all points, but with transparency of discussion I expect we can build a common understanding of issues and constraints.

I believe these discussions will be pivotal in continuing our great academic trajectory, as well as in reinforcing the community of the department. I look forward to seeing you all there.