Our academic staff

Emilia Tjernstrom Onur Keston Valentina Duque

What is your research interest?

I seek to understand how households and firms in poor countries make decisions and how the market environment shapes behaviour. How do farmers choose what technology to use, given imperfect information and weather risk? How do firms respond to low levels of trust in product quality? Can we design policies and interventions that account for market failures and behavioural biases?

To answer this broad set of questions, I try to leverage whatever tools are the most appropriate for the setting, be they randomized controlled trials, laboratory experiments, or other econometric methods.

What are you looking forward to in your new role?

I look forward to getting to know the academic community at the University and in Sydney and Australia more broadly. I can’t wait to get to know the students; advising student research is one of the things I love most about my job!

What would you be if you weren’t an economist?

Documentary photographer or photojournalist.

What is your research interest?

I am interested in tackling “market design” problems. This is an emerging field of applied game theory that concerns identification of real-life problems and finding optimal practical solutions that have direct policy implications. My research concerns the investigation of how to design rules for allocating resources or how to organize successful marketplaces such as college/high-school admission plans, organ-exchange clearing houses, and blood donation banks. I would like to identify why certain market rules or institutions succeed and why others fail.

Where could we find you on the weekend?

You can find me at the depths of the ocean in the eastern suburbs of Sydney waiting for a large pelagic fish to come by. I have always had a passion for spearfishing since I was a kid. Sydney presents many great opportunities to land your dream catch. I was lucky to recently shoot a 25kg kingfish shortly after moving to Sydney, which became my all-time record catch.

What is your research interest?

My research focuses on understanding different factors that affect the process of human capital formation and the transmission of poverty across generations in both developed and developing countries.

In particular, my work has concentrated on two main research agendas: i) how investing early in children’s lives helps reduce longterm poverty and inequality (even at older ages) and ii) how disadvantaged families’ greater exposure to shocks (unemployment, pollution, violence) translate into worse human capital outcomes for their children, and for the subsequent generation.

What are you enjoying the most about your role at the School of Economics?

The School is a very stimulating environment to conduct research and to explore new and exciting research avenues! What I’m enjoying the most are the informal interactions with my colleagues, and as an international researcher, learning about the Australian institutional landscape and discussing with my colleagues how to leverage variation to evaluate social policies!

Hugh Harley James Graham

What is your research interest?

My main teaching and research interest is the development of the global economy over the long-run, especially over the past 1000 years, and using this to help frame today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. This includes the interplay between economic, social, legal and environmental factors. I am also very interested in efforts to improve soil health on a global scale. Of the three great biospheres – soil, oceans, atmosphere – soil is the only one for which we have a fighting chance of remediating in the next decade or so. And I try to keep across developments in banking, where I spent much of my career.

What are you enjoying the most about your new role?

My motivation to return to a formal appointment in the School of Economics - after a pause of nearly 35 years - is all about the privilege of teaching. I enjoy the energy of students and colleagues, and the challenge of reducing the complex to the tractable. One of my mottos is “all education is entertainment” – it’s all about giving students reasons to come back next week. So definitely the teaching. I also love one-on-one mentoring of students.

What is your research interest?

I am broadly interested in macroeconomics, but I am particularly interested in the macroeconomics of housing. In recent work, I have studied: the effect of fluctuations in house prices on household consumption patterns; the importance of investors in the housing market during a housing downturn; the propagation of inter-generational inequality through families that sort into neighbourhoods with unequal school funding; and the labour market consequences of lockdowns and wage subsidy policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What are you enjoying the most about your role at the School of Economics?

Exposure to the thoughts and musings of fantastic colleagues working on a diverse range of topics in economics.

What are you currently reading/ watching/listening to?

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry (which is only ok); Fargo season 3 (which is great); and ‘90s grunge music (which is grunge-tastic).