About Me

Bio

Benjamin Wong is an Associate Professor at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University. He is a macroeconomist who has research interests in macroeconometrics and time series analysis, with a focus on issues related to estimation, inference and interpretation of sources of business cycle fluctuations. A theme of his work has been the development of  tools to inform policy analysis through the estimation and understanding key inputs for macroeconomic policy analysis,  such as the output gap and trend inflation.

He was previously a research economist at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and is a regular visitor at central banks and policy institutions. These include a stint as a central bank research fellow at the Bank for International Settlements, and also a research visitor at, among others, various regional Federal Reserve Banks, Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the SEACEN Research and Training Centre. He is currently co-director of the Macroeconometrics and Model Uncertainty research program at the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics Analysis (CAMA), and is serving on the executive of both the Australasian Macroeconomics Society and Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics.

He holds a PhD in Economics from The Australian National University and a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) from The University of Queensland and has published work in international peer reviewed journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, European Economics Review, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Applied Econometrics, and Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.

PDF of Full CV

Selected Publications

• Random subspace local projections, with Viet Hoang Dinh and Didier Nibbering, Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming)

• Understanding trend inflation through the lens of the goods and services sectors, with Yunjong Eo and Luis Uzeda, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2023, vol.38(5), pg.751-766

• Nowcasting the output gap, with Tino Berger and James Morley, Journal of Econometrics, 2023, vol.232(1), pg.18-34

• Global factors and trend inflation, with Güneş Kamber, Journal of International Economics, 2020, vol.122(C), 103265

• Estimating and accounting for the output gap with large Bayesian vector autoregressions, with James Morley, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2020, vol.35(1), pg.1-18 (lead article)

• Intuitive and reliable estimates of the output gap from a Beveridge-Nelson filter, with Güneş Kamber and James Morley, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018, vol.100(3), pg.550-566

• Do inflation expectations propagate the inflationary impact of real oil price shocks?: Evidence from the Michigan Survey, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2015, vol.47(8), pg.1673-1689

Selected Grants

• Australian Research Council Discovery Projects (DP240100970), Implications of Global Economic Forces for Domestic Monetary Policy, with James Morley, Qazi Haque, and Qingyuan Du [2024-2026] (AUD$309,037)

• Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE200100693), Financial Cycles and the Macroeconomy, [2020-2022] (AUD$405,458)

• Australian Research Council Discovery Projects (DP190100202), Understanding the Sources of Secular Stagnation, with James Morley and Yunjong Eo [2019-2021] (AUD$317,610)

• Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme by Universities Australia and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), New Methods for Incorporating Financial Factors in Estimating Potential Output, with Tino Berger and Julia Richter [2019-2020] (AUD$12,310)