I am the Deputy Director of the Development Policy Centre and a Fellow in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics. My research lies at the intersection of development economics, labour economics, international trade, and the environment. I am a Principal Investigator of the Small Firm Diaries, the Remittance Diaries, and the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey, an invited researcher at J-PAL, and the thematic lead for migration of the Pacific Research Program.

At the Crawford School, I convene the two main graduate research courses in economics, the Masters Research Essay and the two-semester Research Project, as well as the Economics Seminars course for first-year PhD students, and am a member of the Asia Pacific and Business Delegated Ethics Research Committee at the ANU. I also co-convene the ACDE Seminars, the Pacific Update, and our labour mobility webinars. I am also an associate editor of Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies and Asia-Pacific Economic Literature, and the editor of the Development Policy Centre Discussion Papers.

I returned to the ANU in 2019 following two academic appointments abroad, in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College and in the Department of Earth System Science and the Centre on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. I worked in the Australian Government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet—mostly on federal budgets, the school funding reform taskforce (i.e., the Gonski model and negotiations), social investment, and impact evaluation policy (foundational pre-BETA work)—global development, financial services, and various other odd jobs before that.

Personal academic website | Google Scholar page | LinkedIn

Upcoming talks

• 5 October, 2023, University of Melbourne

• 5–7 December, 2023, Australasian AID Conference, ANU

Current teaching

• IDEC9024 Economics Seminars

• IDEC8011 Masters Research Essay

• IDEC8033 Research Project

• DPA14 Empirical Development Policy for the Pacific (Micro-credential)

• Economic Development in the Pacific (Executive Education)

Current research students

• Lekima Nalaukai (University of the South Pacific, panel member, S1 2023–)

• Eko Sumando (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S1 2021–)

• Dyah Pritadrajati (ANU Economics PhD, panel chair, S1 2021–)

• Jose Cobian (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S2 2020–)

• Thomas Wangi (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S1 2021–23). Submitted!

• Debasish Das (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S1 2020–23). Submitted!

• Riswandi (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S2 2019–23). Submitted!