Conference and Session Keynotes
SWAN LECTURE 2023 – Sir Oliver Hart
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Oliver Hart is currently the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1993. He is the 2016 co-recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Finance Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has several honorary degrees.
Hart works mainly on contract theory, the theory of the firm, corporate finance, and law and economics. His research centers on the roles that ownership structure and contractual arrangements play in the governance and boundaries of corporations. He has published a book (Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure, Oxford University Press, 1995) and numerous journal articles. He has used his theoretical work on firms in two legal cases as a government expert (Black and Decker v. U.S.A. and WFC Holdings Corp. (Wells Fargo) v. U.S.A.). He has been president of the American Law and Economics Association and a vice president of the American Economic Association
Presentation topic: Exit vs Voice: The economics of socially responsible investment
Presentation topic: Exit vs Voice: The economics of socially responsible investment
GRUEN LECTURE 2023 – Stephanie Hurder
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Dr. Stephanie Hurder is an entrepreneur working at the intersection of emerging technologies, education, and economics. A Harvard-trained economist, Dr. Hurder co-founded Prysm Group, the leading provider of emerging technology advisory and education to the world’s top professional services, financial services, and technology firms. Prysm Group was featured on the 2022 Inc. 500 list of the most successful companies in America. As a Partner and Founding Economist, Dr. Hurder co-leads the advisory, research, and educational development divisions of the firm.
Dr. Hurder is a frequent speaker and writer on economics and emerging technologies. She has been featured at SXSW, the Federal Reserve, Consensus, CESC, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the Simons Institute at Berkeley. As a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California’s CCI, Dr. Hurder co-developed and taught the first course on economic design for distributed ledger technology in the nation. She is an advisor to the World Economic Forum and an Opinion Columnist for CoinDesk.
Prior to co-founding Prysm Group, Dr. Hurder was a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and an academic researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Hurder has an AB in Mathematics Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, an AM in Economics, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University, where she received the Sandra Ohrn Family Fellowship
Presentation topic: Smart Contracting in Practice
Presentation topic: Smart Contracting in Practice
Session keynotes
Portrait of Professor Emily Lancsar, Head of the Department of Health Services Research and Policy at the ANU.
Emily Lancsar
Presentation title: Stability of Preferences: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccines in Australia, Thursday 29 June
Professor Emily Lancsar is Head of the Department of Health Services Research and Policy in the College of Health and Medicine at the ANU. She is an economist with particular interests in valuing life and health, understanding and modelling choice, preferences and behaviour of key decision makers in the health sector, economic evaluation and policy analysis. Emily holds a number of current and past ARC, MRFF, NHMRC, MRC, ESRC, NIHR and EU funded grants and fellowships. She is a member of a number of government advisory committees including the Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC) and past member of the Evaluation Sub-Committee of MSAC and the Economic Sub-Committee of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. She is an Associate Editor of Health Economics and a past Vice President of the Australian Health Economics Society.
Harry Pei, Northwestern University
Presentation title: Robust Implementation with costly information, Thursday 29 June
Associate Professor Harry Pei is Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. His research interests include Game Theory, Monotone Methods, Political Economy, Law and Economics, and Organizational Economics. Harry earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ashley Craig, Australian National University
Presentation title: Tax Knowledge and Tax Manipulation: A Unifying Model, Thursday 29 June
Dr Ashley Craig is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University (ANU), and a John Mitchell Fellow. He is affiliated with the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan, the Institute of Labor Economics and the ANU Tax & Transfer Policy Institute. Dr Craig’s research spans Public Economics and Labor Economics, with a particular focus on human capital investment, taxation, and inequality.
Richard Holden, UNSW Business School
Smart Contracting: Thursday 29 June
Arghya Ghosh, UNSW
Presentation title: A simple model of burnout, Thursday 29 June
Arghya Ghosh is a Professor at the School of Economics in UNSW Business School. Arghya is an applied theorist with research interests in industrial organization and international trade. Competition among firms underpins a large body of Arghya’s work which is often motivated by policy relevant issues: desirability of entry, infrastructure investment, imperfect property rights, competitor collaboration and partial equity ownership arrangement. His work has appeared in leading journals including RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economic Theory and European Economic Review. Currently, Arghya serves as an Associate Editor at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Simon Loertscher, University of Melbourne
Presentation Title: Triple-IO: A (P)review, Thursday 29 June
Simon Loertscher is professor of economics and director of the Centre for Market Design (CMD) at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on Mechanism Design and Industrial Organization. Recent publications of his appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of Industrial Economics and a member of the editorial board at the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. He is also a founding member of the Asia-Pacific Industrial Organization Society, which organizes the annual APIO Conference.
Maria Racionero, Australian National University
Presentation title: Employer vs Government Parental Leave: Labour Market Effects, Thursday 29 June
Maria Racionero is an Associate Professor of Economics. Her main field of research is public economic theory, with particular interest in optimal taxation, optimal pension and optimal education policies, as well as higher education finance. Maria’s work has been funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Program, where she led a team that examined optimal taxation when the allocation of time matters. Maria’s work has been published in top-ranked international journals including European Economic Review, Canadian Journal of Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Labour Economics, Oxford Economic Papers and Social Choice and Welfare.
Ellen Muir, Harvard University
Presentation title: A mechanism-design approach to property rights, Friday 30 June
Ellen Muir is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. She recently completed her PhD in Economics at Stanford University and will join the Applied Economics Group at MIT Sloan as an Assistant Professor in 2024. Ellen is a microeconomic theorist and her research focuses on a variety of topics in market design, mechanism design and industrial organization.
Idione Meneghel, Australian National University
Presentation title: Paying to overbid, Friday 30 June
Idione Meneghel is an Associate Professor of Economics, whose research interests include game theory, decision theory, auction theory, and the theory of mechanism design. Idione’s research focuses on the existence of equilibrium in games with imperfect information and games with payoffs that lack the usual continuity properties, such as auctions. She has also contributed to the theory of learning and belief formation in an environment in which little information is available to the economic agent and surprises are frequent. Her portfolio of research includes a contribution to the fixed point theory of decomposable sets in non-linear analysis. Idione’s research has appeared in top peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, and Econometrica. Idione has held a Visiting position at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University and serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Mathematical Economics.
Dave Frankel, Melbourne Business School
Presentation title: Equilibrium Selection: A Unified Approach, Friday 30 June
David Frankel earned his PhD from M.I.T. in 1993 and is currently a Professor of Financial Economics at Melbourne Business School, where he teaches Financial Institutions and Global Business Economics. He has held tenure track positions at Tel Aviv University and Iowa State University, and visiting positions at Cornell, Stanford, and Hebrew University.
Sephorah Mangin, Australian National University
Presentation title: Personalized pricing and competitive dispersion, Friday 30 June
Sephorah Mangin is an Associate Professor in the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University. Her research involves using search and matching theory to study a diverse range of problems in macroeconomics, labour, growth, and industrial organisation. Sephorah has published her research in leading journals such as the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the RAND Journal of Economics. She is currently an Associate Editor at the European Economic Review.