About Me

I am currently appointed as Associate Professor and Research Director at the Department of Economics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. I am also an Associate Editor of Journal of Population Economics (Springer). I am affiliated with the Centre of Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University and Global Labor Organization (GLO). At GLO, I lead a research cluster Development, Health, Inequality and Behavior.

I am a health economist interested in issues relating to the economics of health, wellbeing and economic development. My dominant research theme is employing microeconometrics to evaluate the mechanism by which social determinants of health, and preference heterogeneity in individual/household decision making influence design of economic policy. My recent and ongoing research uses computational social science, especially causal inference and machine learning techniques to study impact of economic policy on health, and inequalities in health and well-being of individuals.

I have developed models and techniques to study well-being (i.e., health related quality of life (the Australian Quality of Life, AQoL-8D) and multidimensional deprivation); intrahousehold decision making; health related knowledge and behaviour in the context of HIV/AIDS; health and well-being in retirement; economic policy and behaviour; national and sub-national purchasing power parities (PPPs); health and nutrition insecurity; malnutrition and child health. I have extensive experience in handling large datasets from developed and developing countries including United States of America, Australia, United Kingdom, India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Botswana, Bangladesh and Combodia.

My research has been published in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals including Health Economics, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, American Journal for Agricultural Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Energy Economics, Macroeconomic Dynamics, Review of Income and Wealth, Journal of Biosocial Sciences, Value in Health, Quality of Life Research, British Medical Bulletin, Economic Record , Economics and Human Biology among others.

Previously, I have worked at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics and Department of Economics at Monash University, Melbourne and Center for Health Economics, Monash Business School at Monash University I obtained my PhD in Economics from the Australian National University, Canberra.

News:

  • 2022: Research mapping health related quality of life using machine learning and econometrics techniques forthcoming in Health Economics

  • 2021: Recent paper published in Economics & Human Biology

  • 2021: Recent paper published in Economic Record (Available here)

  • 2021: Recent paper published in Energy Economics (Available here)

  • 2021: Research on PPL and mental health has been covered by Sydney Morning Herald on 11/02/2021 here.

  • 2020: Paper analysing mental health outcomes of paid parental leave has been published in Health Economics (available here)

  • 2019: Join us for the first "Workshop on the Economics of Health Behaviour", Macquarie University, Sydney 11-13 November 2019. For more information visit Conference website.

  • 2019: Join us for the "Sydney Development Economics Seminars" from 1st August, 2019. This is a fortnightly seminar series across four universities based in Sydney (UNSW, Macquarie University, University Technology Sydney and University of Sydney) with the objective of providing a ‘social tea’ towards facilitating collaborations among development economists. For more information drop an email to me or (Shyamal Chowdhury (USyd); Sarah Walker (UNSW); Esther Mirjam Girsberger (UTS).