• MonashU
• HonoursEconomics
• Matching2017

(quick link to this site: http://tinyurl.com/HonsMatching2017)

Welcome to the Matching website for Economics Honours students 2017. The aim is to share supervisor and project information for 2017 Honours students. For any questions or inquiries, please contact the Honours Research Unit Coordinator, Russell Smyth ( russell.smyth@monash.edu ).

Research Topics + Supervisors

NOTE: these topics and supervisors are subject to review/updating for 2017. 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) website

• Email: Simon.Angus@monash.edu

• note: in 2017 I am likely to be away for a significant portion of Semester 2, this may make supervision difficult.
• Computational Science, Complexity Science, Data science, Networks, Evolutionary game theory, Agent Based Modelling
• Topics:

  1. Economics of innovations & technology:

     • [Computer Modelling] Extending the 'Bit-Economy' (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)

     • [Theory and/or numerical simulation] The role of technology in the early development of man (see here)

  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)

     • [Data mining/Empirical/Networks] A massive data set on the internet: activity, penetration and speed, globally. High spatial and temporal resolution. (watch this)

  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 (evolutionary game theory, replicator dynamics, Schumpeterian perspective of economic change)

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?
  2. Any current issue is worthy of consideration!
  3. 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; Measuring the effect of marquee players on the demand for Australian professional soccer; Is left-footedness an advantage in the AFL?

Zhijun Chen (Caulfield)

• Email: zhijun.Chen@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Industrial Organization
  2. Competition Policy

Wenli Cheng (Caulfield)

• Email: Wenli.Cheng@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Chinese economy
  2. Finance and economic development

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

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

Nick Feltovich (Clayton)

• Email: nicholas.feltovich@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Experimental game theory
  2. Bargaining theory
  3. Bargaining experiments
  4. Macroeconomics experiments

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
  4. Leadership

Edwyna Harris (Clayton)

• Email: edwyna.harris@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Environmental Economics - general
  2. Environmental Economics - Irrigation water allocation and pricing
  3. Economic History - general
  4. Economist History - Australia
  5. Institutional Economics
  6. Law and Economics

Asad Islam (Caulfield)

• Email: asadul.islam@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Economics of education
  2. Social network
  3. Field Experiments in developing countries
  4. Agricultural and Food security
  5. Health economics
  6. corruption

Jaai Parasnis (Clayton)

• Email: jaai.parasnis@@monash.edu

See more about my research at https://sites.google.com/site/jaaiparasnis/

• Topics:
  1. Labor economics
  2. Fertility
  3. Economics of Education
  4. Migration

Some suggestions for topics: child birth and women's labour force participation, do women work in occupations they train for?

Gennadi Kazakevitch (Clayton)

• Email: gennadi.kazakevitch@monash.edu

• to update: "In 2016 I will be taking no new students, and will only continue supervising a second year masters student's project."

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
  4. Political economy

Andreas Leibbrandt (Clayton)

• Email: andreas.leibbrandt@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. All kinds of experiments (field, lab, artefactual)
  2. Research collaborations with Australian governmental departments on various topics (feel free to ask!)
  3. Cooperation and Social Preferences (when do people cooperate, when are they selfish, which institutions help increase cooperation)
  4. Competitiveness and Gender Differences (do women shy away from competition? Does this explain the gender wage gap?)

Matt Leister (Clayton)

• Email: matthew.leister@monash.edu

• Areas of interest: Microeconomic Theory, Industrial Organization (Theory), Social and Economic Networks, Information Economics
• Topics:
  1. Intermediation and Market Structure
  2. Information Acquisition, Information Markets
  3. Auctions

Anke Leroux (Caulfield)

• Email: anke.leroux@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Environmental and resource economics
  2. Decisions under risk and uncertainty

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. Understanding the "twin" problem of obesity and malnutrition in developing countries
    2. Social Identity, Gender and Discrimination
    3. Affirmative Action Policies and Corporate Governance

Sephorah Mangin (Caulfield)

• Email: Sephorah.Mangin@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Macroeconomics (theory)
  2. Economic growth (theory)
  3. Unemployment, macro labor

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
  2. Public and political economics
  3. Family economics

Vai-Lam Mui (Clayton)

• Email: Vai-Lam.Mui@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Political economy (theory)
  2. Besides theoretical work on political economy, I would be interested in supervising a project on “On Liberty and Freedom of Expression in a Post-Truth Society” this year.

Consider the following on the Oxford Dictionary website: “After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016).”

This project asks: “How can we have meaningful public debates in a post-truth era with the threats of politician manipulation of public opinion?” We consider two starting points to answer this question. The first will be John Stuart Mill’s 1859 classic essay On Liberty that articulated influential arguments why freedom of expression matters. The second will be the recent work that uses formal game-theoretic models to study issues such as political ideologies and wishful denial of reality (Levy, Journal of Public Economics, 2014; Benabou and Tirole, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2016).

You will be reading the work of classical thinkers such as Mill, recent game-theoretic contributions on politics and self-denial of reality, and use what you learn to reflect on the question of how we can have meaningful public debates in the contexts of current events. Interested student should have a strong background in micro economic theory, good command of calculus, and enjoy reading about current events, writings by classical thinkers, and recent papers containing formal models on self-manipulation of beliefs.

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 (Caulfield)

• Email: Paulo.Santos@monash.edu

• Topics: Development economics, particularly in Southeast Asia
  1. Subjective expectations of returns to education among Aboriginal Australians
  2. Not for turning: shocks and preferences
  3. Index insurance for human capital shocks

Russell Smyth (Clayton)

• Email: russell.smyth@monash.edu

• More about my research at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Smyth

• Research topics:
  • Education, health, labour, and development economics
  • Energy economics
  • Subjective wellbeing/economics of happiness
  • Empirical legal studies/law and economics
  • Most topics to do with the Chinese economy.

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 (e.g., Trade and Employment) and Political Economy that may not fall into the theme of the previous paragraph.

David Treisman (City/Caulfield)

• Email: David.Treisman@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Asset Pricing - including emerging financial markets
  2. Financial Economics - general, financial markets, governance, institutions, corporate finance etc.
  3. Interactions of Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
  4. International Finance - including international factor movements and international business
  5. Political Economy

Rebecca Valenzuela (Caulfield)

• Email: Rebecca.Valenzuela@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Poverty and Inequality Measurement
  2. Measurement of Living Standards

  3. Expenditure Patterns of Households& Impact on Welfare

  4. Issues associated with Ageing Population
  5. Home Ownership Patterns in Australia
  6. Costs of Raising Children/Family Economics

Choon Wang (Clayton)

• Email: liang.c.wang@monash.edu

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

• Research topics:
  • Education, health, labour, public, and development economics:
    • The effects of public school autonomy on test scores and housing prices
    • Racial profiling and police killings
    • The impact of affirmative action on pro- and anti-social behaviours
    • Commercial sex work
  • Some recent students under my supervision wrote about:
    • The effects of after-school classes on private tutoring, mental health, and college attendance rates (published in Sociology)
    • The effect of affirmative action on workplace sabotage (published in Management Science)
    • The capitalisation of high-achieving public high schools in local property prices
    • Hedonic pricing of race horses
    • The effect of TV watching on BMI
    • Climate change and infectious diseases

Erte Xiao (Clayton)

• Email: Erte.Xiao@monash.edu

• Topics:
  1. Experimental economics
  2. Behavioural economics

Examples of research projects: social norms, understanding how monetary and non-monetary incentives affect prosocial behaviour... See more at https://sites.google.com/site/ertexiao/home

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

David Johnston (Clayton)

• Email: david.johnston@monash.edu

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

• Areas of interest: health economics, labour economics, and microeconometrics
• Research topics:
  • All kinds of empirical studies using the Australian HILDA data set
  • The effects of natural disasters on individual health, labour and behavioural outcomes
  • Understanding the extent, determinants and consequences of misreporting information in social surveys

Supervisors unavailable in 2017

• null