2023

Australian Economics Conference season 2023

The Australian  Economics conference season is upon us - a time many Economists take part in and look forward to.

“The Australian Economics Conference Season in November and December each year is a highlight of the year, Professor Sascha Becker said.

“Each week features workshops in economics, many in Melbourne. We have many visitors from the Northern Hemisphere who escape the cold weather to enjoy the Australian summer and the great hospitality of the closely-knit Economics community ‘down under’,” Prof Becker said.

Here is an incredible list of some of the many events our colleagues will take part in:

A/Prof Anke Leroux is heading to Dubai in December as part of Monash’s Delegation to COP28. She will be representing Monash Business School and Green Lab, and is currently co-organising events with A/Prof Anita Foerster to be run at the Monash Blue Zone Pavilion.

From the COP28 Taskforce:

“It is an especially exciting COP for Monash this year, as this will be the first year the University hosts a pavilion in the UNFCCC-managed Blue Zone. In fact, Monash will be the first and (as far as we’re aware) only University in the Indo-Pacific region to host a pavilion in the Blue Zone.  It’s a considerable investment of time and resources and aims to communicate the university’s profound commitment to climate action in the critical days ahead.

“As Australia’s largest and most global university, with an international footprint across Australia, Asia Pacific, Europe, India and China, we are developing a thought-provoking agenda for COP28 that reflects the urgency of this moment and our role, as part of a global community, to mitigate and address the climate crisis.

“Our pavilion aims to do far more than feature Monash achievements or projects – instead, we aim to create a space for a wide range of partners and organisations to have transformative, bold, and where needed difficult, conversations.

“Our COP28 Taskforce is busy curating a series of engaging events and presentations to cover the full two weeks at COP.”

Associate Professor Choon Wang, Professor Asad Islam, Dr Kushneel Prakash (Uni Melbourne; former PhD student), and Professor Russell Smyth travelled to Fiji to engage with the industry, universities and ministries from 19 October to 27 October. They undertook research and policy meetings with the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Professor Biman Prasad, the Ministry of Sugar Industry and stakeholders, Fiji Rice PTE Ltd, Energy Fiji Ltd, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Agriculture and Waterways, University of South Pacific, and Fiji National University.

Monash Business School and Melbourne University academics travelled to Fiji in October 2023 to meet government and business officials and local academics.

A/Prof Quoc-Anh (Q.A.) Do was recently invited to join the CESifo, a global independent research network based in Munich whose mission is to advance international scientific knowledge exchange about economics and economic policy.

It is both an important research tool and a highly visible publication outlet for its members.

Dr Mita Bhattacharya has had two PhD students complete their theses:

• Dr Arjita Sikder
  • Thesis title: Three essays on energy and development economics
  • Supervisors: Mita Bhattacharya, Vinod Mishra.
• Dr Diep Phan
  • Thesis Title: Essays on the economics of night-time lights: Data with applications to energy and economic development
  • Supervisors: Mita Bhattacharya, Russell Smyth, and Xibin Zhang.

Dr Ricardo Dahis is attending the NEUDC conference at Harvard on November 4-5.

A/Prof Xiaojian Zhao and M. Zhongwen Chen will present at Judgement and decision-making in the virtual and real worlds; the fifth annual Monash Business Behavioural Laboratory (MBBL) Symposium, on November 20 and 21.

Prof Yves Zenou will give the plenary lecture at the 2024 Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, 12-15 January 2024.

Prof Erte Xiao and Prof Lata Gangadharan recently won The Leadership Quarterly 2022 Best Article Award (Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao (2022) for their article: "Leadership Selection: Can Changing the Default Break the Glass Ceiling?"

Prof Chongwoo Choe received the International Journal of Industrial Organization (IJIO) Best Theory Paper Award 2023: (Chongwoo Choe, Noriaki Matsushima and Mark J. Tremblay), "Behavior-based personalized pricing: When firms can share customer information.

Four researchers from the department have been awarded ARC grants this year. Congratulations!

Together with a group of researchers from the department of Econometrics and Business Statistics Dr Qingyuan Du was awarded $ 309, 037 for a project entitled “Implications of global economic forces for domestic monetary policy.”

Professors Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao were awarded  $ 344,400 for their project “Changing institutions to mitigate gender leadership gaps: Power of defaults”

This years’ department awards for teaching were announced at the department meeting on July 14.

Associate Professor Xiaojian Zhao was awarded a commendation.

Ms Zhongwen Chen received the award for best TA.

Ms Icy Guo received a commendation in the TA awards.

Dr Mita Bhattacharya presented the paper  'A cross-country study on the resilience of electricity consumption to COVID-19 contaminant policies', at WEA International, July 2022 in San Diego (virtual presentation).

Dr Laura Puzzello organised a three- day workshop between July 18-20 on Meeting AEA replication standards using Quarto and GitHub. The workshop was aimed at all members of the department as well as PhD students. The workshop was instructed by Ms Cynthia Huang.

On August 4 2023 Associate Professor Xiaojian Zhao is organising the Monash Business School Workshop to Further Interdisciplinary Research on Motivated Cognition in Virtual Reality. He is also one of the speakers along with Ms Zhongwen Chen from the department.

The focus of the workshop is to encourage speakers from different disciplines to share their expertise and create new opportunities in the interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborations. It attempts to explore the use of VR technology and machine learning to conduct a fully controlled economic experiment of human behaviours that could be difficult to achieve in the standard fields and laboratories.

Professor Yves Zenou has presented at the following institutions during May and June 2023.

• Economics seminar series, New York University at Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), May 1, 2023.
• Center for Behavioral Institutional Design (C-BID) seminar series, New York University at Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), May 4, 2023.
• Workshop on social and economic networks, AMU-AMSE, Marseille, June 1-2, 2023.
• Seminar in economic development, Paris School of Economics, June 12, 2023.
• Seminar at the department of economics, Stockholm University, June 15, 2023.

Professor Sascha Becker has been appointed Joint Managing editor of The Economic Journal.

Congratulations to Dr Stefanie Fischer who has been promoted to Associate Professor and Dr Isaac Gross who was promoted to Senior lecturer.

A number of new staff are due to arrive in the coming months. We look forward to making them feel welcome!

Dr Ricardo Dahis arrived July 31.

Dr Maxime Gravouille arrives later in the year.

Professor Moshe Hazan arrives September 1.

Dr Filip Premik arrives September 1.

Department Teaching Assistant Induction 

The Department TA Induction was held on 21 February 2023. A warm welcome was given by A/Prof Vinod Mishra (Deputy HOD) to the 2023 TA team members. We had a great turnout, and it was an excellent opportunity for everyone to get to know each other. Dr Jaai Parsanis (Learning and Teaching Director) and Dr Anupama Sethi (TA Coordinator) provided information regarding the resources, support available to the TAs and their role. Thank you to Dr George Rivers for sharing his video discussing the expectations from TAs, and Dr Anthony Niu for giving a demo tutorial.  We thank our professional staff Ms Sue Ball, Ms Angela Kousourakis and Ms Elena Shcherbak for their continuing support. We heartily welcome our TAs and are confident they are going to contribute towards our Department's goal of teaching excellence. We wish all of them a great semester!

Professor Sascha Becker co-organised the inaugural ASREC Australasia Conference at Monash Business School, on the 23^rd and 24^th of March 2023, together with Associate Professor Jeanet Bentzen from the University of Copenhagen. The inaugural speaker was Professor Pauline Grosjean from University of New South Wales.

Prof Becker also gave four seminars in January 2023. He presented at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society and at the University of Luxembourg. In Germany he also presented at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn and at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

In February, he presented at the Australasian Public Choice Conference (APCC) in Perth.

Dr Mita Bhattacharya took part in the following workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in December 2022: 'Renewables and Net-Zero Targets: Current status for Australia and India'.

Melbourne Trade workshop

Associate Professor Laura Puzello organised the 6^th Melbourne trade workshop on December 5 2022 which was held in person at Monash Business School.

The workshop was jointly organised by Monash Business School and the Trade and Development unit at The University of Melbourne. This year’s featured speakers were Mary Amiti from New York Federal Reserve, Associate Professor Bingjing Li  from Hong Kong University and Professor Frederic Warzynski from Aarhus University.

There were between 16-20 participants per session, great speakers and discussants, and active participants from ANU, RMIT and Swinburne. Monash PhD students and other departments’ members participated. Talks provided insights on firms' expansion strategies, the US-China trade war and its effect on countries’ income and welfare, and multinationals R&D activity in South Korea.

Gender workshop

On March 17 The Department of Economics organized a mini department workshop on Gender. The aim was to bring together colleagues and PhD students who work on topics relating to gender using different kinds of data and methods (lab experiments, field experiments, observational data and theory). The event was a huge success.

The organising committee comprised Dr Solmaz Moslehi, Professor Pushkar Maitra and Dr Jaai Parasnis.

Associate Professor Michelle Rendall assisted in organising the VAMS Workshop at the University of Sydney from Dec 12-13 2022. Her colleagues on the committee were Dr Elena Capatina (ANU), Dr James Graham (USyd), and Dr Satoshi Tanaka (UQ). Financial support for this workshop was  generously provided by the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, and Monash University.

Professor Yves Zenou was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (class for social sciences). On 6-7 March he also gave two seminars at the University of Sydney and University of Technology Sydney.

MonLEE

During Orientation Week in Semester 1, Monash Laboratory for Experimental Economics (MonLEE) organized a two-day special event. Our MonLEE managers Mike Wu and Zhongwen Chen created a coffee mug “relay race” (students got free coffee mugs once they invited their friends to sign up for MoneLEE) as an incentive device to recruit subjects. The recruitment was a great success. 286 students and staff registered as new users. Moreover, 35 students experienced an economic experiment in VR under the technical support from the e-Solution team.

On March 17, MonLEE offered a full-day excursion for 28 high school students from John Monash Science School to Clayton campus where Amy Newman (a senior student recruitment coordinator) at Monash Business School first provided an overview about the Monash Business School, as well as student life at Monash University, followed by MonLEE staff’s short introduction of behavioral economics. Dr Birendra Rai also kindly provided an introduction of experimental economics (frontier research topics and methodologies) and shared his personal experience of the transition from engineering background to economic science.

Prof Sascha Becker is organising the 5th Monash-Warwick-Zurich “Text as Data” workshops on 3 and 4 April, with A/Prof Elliott Ash from ETH Zurich.

On 19– 22 April, Professor Kaveh Majslesi will organise the “CEPR Eighth European Workshop on Household Finance”. CEPR, the flagship organisation in Europe for economic research and policy, holds an annual workshop that consists of an event with industry partners followed by a few days of discussion and presentation of academic papers. It has always been held in Europe, but this year it will be held in Australia for the first time, on behalf of the Monash Business School.

Associate Professor Simon Angus was interviewed by the ABC on the battle to keep the internet up and running in the Ukraine amidst Russian attacks.

Dr Gennadi Kazakevitch featured in the West Australian on the elimination of industries in Australia in favour of cheap imports and international supply chains.