Research

Work in progress

PhD Thesis: Heterogeneity and Asymmetry in the Marginal Propensity to Consume

Building on the 'partial insurance' framework of Blundell, Pistaferri and Preston (2008), I estimate households' marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory and permanent income shocks using data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics over 1999-2019. Following Chatterjee, Morley and Singh (2021), I use the state space representation of the model but estimate it with Bayesian methods, which provide a natural setting for estimating high dimensional models with unobserved components. I extend the model in different directions by allowing for: i) asymmetry in MPCs with respect to the sign of transitory income shocks; ii) observable and unobservable heterogeneity in MPCs; iii) robust aggregation of population statistics; and iv) selection of the main drivers of MPC variation from a rich set of covariates. The results challenge some conventional understanding of consumption smoothing behaviour.

Publications

Ballantyne A, B Coates (2022), 'No one left behind: Why Australia should lock in full employment', Grattan Institute.
Ballantyne A, T Cusbert, R Evans, R Guttmann, J Hambur, A Hamilton, E Kendall, R McCririck, G Nodari and D Rees (2019), 'MARTIN Has Its Place: A Macroeconometric Model of the Australian Economy', RBA Research Discussion Paper No. 2019-07.
Ballantyne A, C Gillitzer, D Jacobs and E Rankin (2016), ‘Disagreement about Inflation Expectations’, RBA Research Discussion Paper No. 2016-02.
Ballantyne A and S Langcake (2016), ‘Why Has Retail Inflation Been So Low’, RBA Bulletin, June, pp9–17.
Ballantyne A, D De Voss and D Jacobs (2014), ‘Unemployment and Spare Capacity in the Labour Market’, RBA Bulletin, September, pp7–20.
Ballantyne A, J Hambur, I Roberts and M Wright (2014), ‘Financial Reform in Australia and China', RBA Research Discussion Paper No. 2014-10.

Econometric coding

Baetschmann G, A Ballantyne, KE Staub and R Winkelmann (2020), 'feologit: A new command for estimating fixed-effects ordered logit models', The Stata Journal, 20(2), 253–275.
brfeglm: bias-reduced fixed effects GLM estimator for probit, logit and cloglog models.

Teaching/Workshops

ECON4201/ECON7204 Applied Macroeconometrics (2023), University of New South Wales

This course provides an introduction to econometrics as it is applied in macroeconomics. Emphasis is on hands-on implementation of the methods covered in the course. Topics include macroeconomic data, linear and nonlinear time series models, practical issues with likelihood-based inference for these models, forecast evaluation, structural identification and state-space models.

Introduction to Spartan: Tutorial on High Performance Computing (2017, 2019, 2021)

This tutorial provides participants with an overview of the high performance computing (HPC) facilities, named Spartan (website), available to researchers at the University of Melbourne. The presentation is accompanied by notes that provide a stand-alone reference in combination with the tutorial code. The content is tailored for those wishing to use Stata or R in a parallel computing environment, but can easily be adapted to Matlab or other statistical software. The tutorial provides a very basic overview of Spartan, some instructions to navigate the system (using Unix commands) and submit jobs via the SLURM workload manager, as well as a couple of simple examples using Stata and R. Tutorial materials are available on request.

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