• MonashU
• HonoursEconomics
• Matching2014

Welcome to the Matching website for Economics Honours students 2014. The aim is to share information from prospective Honours students such that prospective supervisors can supply topics that are in demand. For any questions or inquiries, please contact the Honours Research Unit Coordinator, Choon Wang ( mailto:liang.c.wang@monash.edu ).

Honours topics in Demand

Honours Students: please put your name and topic of interest under the following headings (or create a new heading if you think you must). See MonashU/HonoursEconomics/Matching2010 or MonashU/HonoursEconomics/Matching2011 or MonashU/HonoursEconomics/Matching2012 or MonashU/HonoursEconomics/Matching2013 for how it is done.

You can place your name and a topic under multiple discipline areas. Or, create your own discipline area if you like.

Example Topic

• Jo Blogs (Email: jo-blogs@myemail.address)

  1. Topic / area of interest 1
  2. Topic / area of interest 2

• Josephine Blogser (Email: jos-blogser@myemail.address)

  1. Topic / area of interest 1

Applied Macro

• replace me

Applied Micro

• replace me

Development Economics

• Chiedza Choto (Email: chiedzachoto@gmail.com)

  1. How developed countries have set policies to improve economic growth (through policies that improve education, health and reduce poverty).

• Rhys Murrian (Email: ramur4@student.monash.edu)

  1. The effect of microfinancing on the composition of expenditure within low-income households - Does this result in an increased standard of living over time (on average)?

Environmental Economics

• replace me

Experimental Economics

• replace me

Financial Economics

• replace me

Health Economics

• replace me

Labour Economics

• replace me

Other ...

• replace me

Honours topics in Supply

NOTE: these topics and supervisors are subject to review/updating for 2014. If you have a supervisor in mind who is not listed, then feel free to contact them directly.

Klaus Abbink (Clayton)

• Email: klaus.abbink@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Behavioural Economics: Mistrust games
  2. Behavioural Economics: Risk assessment in sudden death situations

Simon Angus (Clayton)

• Email: Simon.Angus@monash.edu

• Topics:

  1. Economics of innovations & technology:

     • [Computer Modelling] Extending the 'BitEconomy' (see here)

     • [Data mining/Empirical/Networks] History of economic innovations around the industrial revolution from a very large dataset on technology publications (ask me for some slides)
  2. Large, new, interesting Data
     • [Data mining/Empirical/Networks] What fraction of culture is determined by our ancestry? -- evidence from Google Trends (ask me to explain more)
  3. Any integrated economic modelling problem with important feed-backs, non-linearities and complexity science

     • Consider extensions/additions to the projects listed here: http://tinyurl.com/MonIEMProjectGallery2010

  4. Modelling economic networks: strategic interactions on networks, dynamic economic networks
  5. Evolutionary economics

Mita Bhattacharya (Caulfield)

• Email: Mita.Bhattacharya@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Industrial Production, Economic Growth and Energy Policies in Developing Countries
  2. Topics related to trade reform, industrial competitiveness and growth for both developed and developing countries

Ross Booth

• Email: Ross.Booth@monash.edu (Clayton)

• Topics:
  1. Any aspect of the economics of a sport, or a sports league? For example:
  2. Are player drafts and salary caps likely to be successful in increasing competitive balance?
  3. What methods of revenue sharing should be used by a sports league to increase competitive balance?
  4. Some recent topics have been - The effect of limited free agency in the AFL; The effect of free agency in US professional sports; Competitive balance in F1 Grand Prix racing; Uncertainty of match outcome and TV ratings

Wenli Cheng (Caulfield)

• Email: Wenli.Cheng@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Income inequality in China
  2. TFP performance and resource mis-allocation
  3. Austrian Economics

Qingyuan Du (Caulfield)

• Email: qingyuan.du@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Global imbalance, especially large current account surpluses and high savings rates in eastern asian countries
  2. Exchange rate, what determines the equilibrium level of a country's real exchange rate. What should be the optimal nominal exchange regime for a country?
  3. Chinese economy

Horag Choi (Caulfield)

• Email: horag.choi@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. International Macroeconomics

Gaurav Datt (Clayton)

• Email: gaurav.datt@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Development economics, especially poverty and inequality analysis

Nick Feltovich (Clayton)

• Email: nicholas.feltovich@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Experimental economics
  2. Bargaining
  3. Game theory

Peter Forsyth (Clayton)

• Email: Peter.Forsyth@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Should Australia permit Singapore Airlines to operate between Australia and the US?
  2. Can international and domestic aviation be covered by an ETS?
  3. Should Australian airports be regulated?
  4. Can, and should, the tourism industry respond to the mining boom and the high Australian dollar?

Lata Gangadharan (Clayton)

• Email: lata.gangadharan@monash.edu

• Topics
  1. Experimental Economics
  2. Behavioural Economics

Phil Grossman (Clayton)

• Email: philip.grossman@monash.edu

• Topics
  1. Experimental economics
  2. Behavioural economics
  3. Charitable giving

Youjin Hahn (Clayton)

• Email: youjin.hahn@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Health Economics
  2. Economics of Education
  3. Other general labour and public economics

Edwyna Harris (Clayton)

• Email: edwyna.harris@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Environmental Economics
  2. Economic History
  3. Institutional Economics
  4. Law and Economics

Asad Islam (Caulfield)

• Email: asadul.islam@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Commercial sex work in Bangladesh
  2. Corruption
  3. Program/policy evaluation
  4. Other topics in development economics

Elias Khalil (Clayton)

• Email: elias.khalil@monash.edu

• Topics (please note - all in theory):
  1. Behavioral economics (the role of context in decision making; regret; myside-bias; temptations; identity)
  2. Ethics and Economics
  3. Happiness and income

Stephen King (Caulfield)

• Email: Stephen.King@monash.edu

• Topics: Happy with most areas of applied microeconomic theory and industrial organisation theory. Examples:
  1. Vertical integration and pricing. Looking at two Australian competition cases from 2013, where the Courts came to different conclusions depending on whether an integrated firm forced a price on a rival, or vice versa - is this consistent with economics or did the Courts just get it wrong?
  2. Multi-homing (where a market participant can access more than one platform) and market power in two-sided markets (like credit cards, internet sites, etc).
  3. Why are domestic contracts (i.e. a domestic producer sells an input to a downstream firm that uses the input to produce something for the Australian market) sometimes based on a world price even though though the world price is volatile? Would it be better if they 'insured' each other and why don't they do this?

Andreas Leibbrandt(Clayton)

• Email: andreas.leibbrandt@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Determinants for cooperation
  2. Determinants for competitiveness

Anke Leroux(Caulfield)

• Email: anke.leroux@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Environmental and natural resource economics (theory)
  2. Real option theory
  3. Economics of climate change, biodiversity conservation, invasive species and water resources

Gary Magee (Caulfield)

• Email: Gary.Magee@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Any aspect of Economic History

Pushkar Maitra (Clayton)

• Email: pushkar.maitra@monash.edu

• Areas of interest: Development Economics
  • Specific projects:
    1. Economic growth and obesity in developing countries
    2. Health impacts of tobacco consumption in developing countries

Vinod Mishra (Berwick)

• Email: vinod.mishra@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Financial Markets (Stock market efficiency, Structural breaks, Co-integration)
  2. Applied Industrial organisation
  3. Survey data analysis

Solmaz Moslehi (Caulfield)

• Email: Solmaz.Moslehi@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Macroeconomics and Growth (theory)
  2. Public and political economics (theory)

Jaai Parasnis (Berwick)

• Email: jaai.parasnis@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Labour Economics
  2. Education and migration

* Some specific suggestions:

1. education choices of migrants
2. Youth unemployment

Laura Puzzello (Caulfield)

• Email: laura.puzzello@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Empirical international trade
  2. Outsourcing in the global economy

Birendra Rai (Clayton)

• Email: Birendra.Rai@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Irrationality and unawareness
  2. Economics of language

Paul Raschky (Caulfield)

• Email: Paul.Raschky@monash.edu

• Topics:
  • Empirical (applied econometric) analysis of topics in:
    • Economic valuation study as part of the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities
    • Political economy
    • Environmental economics
    • Economics of natural disasters
    • Economics of the media

Anmol Ratan (Clayton)

• Email: anmol.ratan@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Behavioral Economics; models of individual decision making in risk/uncertainty
  2. Experimental Economics: Protocols, Procedures, Unidentified influences, External Validity
  3. Reading course: Students bring their topics of interest in above, present and discuss their work to wider audience and develop a research problem
  4. Developing experiments for economic analysis

Paulo Santos (Clayton)

• Email: Paulo.Santos@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Property rigths and investment in land conservation: the case of pastoral leases in WA
  2. Land titling, women empowerment and marriage dissolution
  3. Willingness to pay for livelihood insurance using happiness data
  4. Job insecurity and intra-family transfers in a developing country
  5. Economic aspects of climate change adaptation in Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley, WA (TBC)
  6. Subjective expectations of returns to education among Aboriginal Australians

Christis Tombazos (Clayton)

• Email: christis.tombazos@monash.edu

• Topics:

In 1968 Kenneth Arrow wrote "The notion that, through the workings of an entire system, effects may be very different from, and even opposed to, intentions is surely the most important intellectual contribution that economic thought has made to the general understanding of social processes." This notion provides an excellent premise for the sort of tractable and interesting honours projects that I would be interested to supervise. Examples include a good deal of policies devised by governments, corporations, universities, and other large institutions.

I would also consider supervising topics in International Economics and Political Economy that may not fall into the theme of the previous paragraph.

Rebecca Valenzuela (Caulfield)

• Email: Rebecca.Valenzuela@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Getting Rich in the Fair-Go Economy: The evolution of top incomes in Australia
  2. Analysis of Middle Income Households in Australia: Is there a hollowing out?

Choon Wang (Clayton)

• Email: liang.c.wang@monash.edu

• More about my research at https://sites.google.com/site/liangchoonwang/research

• Research topics:
  1. Education
  2. Health
  3. Development Economics

Ian Wills (Clayton)

• Email: Ian.Wills@monash.edu

• Topics:
  • Environmental topics, in particular:
    • Sustainability;
    • Economics of pollution; and
    • Economics of climate change.

Hee-Seung Yang (Clayton)

• Email: heeseung.yang@monash.edu

• More about my research at https://sites.google.com/site/heeseungyang/home

• Topics:
  1. Public Finance
  2. Labour Economics
  3. Health
  4. Examples: government social insurance programs, pensions, marriage market, labour supply/demand, job polarization and health care reforms

Siew Ling Yew (Clayton)

• Email: Siew.Yew@monash.edu

• Topics:
  • Economic growth
  • Macroeconomics and public finance

Not Available For Supervision

Vai-Lam Mui (Sabbatical leave)

Gennadi Kazakevitch

Laura Puzzello (Maternity leave)