I am the Deputy Director and a Senior Policy Fellow at the Development Policy Centre, and a Fellow in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics. I am also a Principal Investigator of the Small Firm Diaries and the Remittance Diaries, an invited researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the migration research lead for the Australian Government’s Pacific Research Program.

My research lies at the intersection of development economics, labour economics, international trade, and the environment, and I mostly work on Indonesia, Australia, and the Pacific. See the publications tab above or the two links right below.

At the Crawford School, I convene the two premier graduate research courses in economics, the Masters Research Essay and the two-semester Research Project, as well as the Economics Seminars for first-year economics PhD students. I also co-convene the ACDE Seminars, the Pacific Update, and our labour mobility webinars, and am an associate editor of Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies and the editor of the Development Policy Centre Discussion Papers.

I returned to Canberra and 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

Upcoming Talks

• 18 November 2022, Public Sector Economist Conference, Canberra

• 28–30 November 2022, Australasian AID Conference, Canberra

Current Teaching

• IDEC9024 Economics Seminars, S2 2022

• IDEC8011 Masters Research Essay, S1 2022–

• IDEC8033 Research Project, S1 2022–

• DPA14 Empirical Development Policy for the Pacific, 2022– (Micro-credential)

• Economic Development in the Pacific, S2 2019– (Executive Education course)

Current Research Students

• Hiroshi Maeda (ANU Masters Research Project, supervisor, S2 2022–)

• Mi Lim Kim (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S1 2022–)

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

• Thomas Wangi (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–)

• Debasish Das (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S1 2020–)

• Riswandi (ANU Economics PhD, panel member, S2 2019–)