Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Economics at Monash University
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Economics at Monash University
Embedded Files
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash SoDa Labs (April 2025 – April 2027). My research is in political economy, digital economics, and applied econometrics, with a focus on the digital capacity of states, government information practices, and applications of large language models to economic research. I completed my PhD at Monash in February 2025, supervised by Prof. Paul A. Raschky and A/Prof. Simon Angus.
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash SoDa Labs (April 2025 – April 2027). My research is in political economy, digital economics, and applied econometrics, with a focus on the digital capacity of states, government information practices, and applications of large language models to economic research. I completed my PhD at Monash in February 2025, supervised by Prof. Paul A. Raschky and A/Prof. Simon Angus.
Research Projects in Progress
Research Projects in Progress
Machine-Readable Economics Papers for Agentic Research
A pipeline that converts NBER working-paper PDFs into structured, source-linked records — data sources, methods, findings, limitations, open questions, citations, and replication metadata — exposed as SQL tables, semantic-search indexes, and graph objects. First build applied to 1,608 NBER working papers from 2025–2026. Draft for general comments. Please do not cite this version or use it for commercial purposes.
Digital State Capacity.
First we create a new objective indicator of the ICT capabilities of states at a global, sub-national level which we call 'Digital State Capacity' between 2000 and 2024. Specifically we measure the number of computers and internet connected devices governments are able to sustain at the organisational level for over 190 countries worldwide. We study the importance of government ICT capacity for explaining within country variation of government quality.
Joint Work with SoDa Labs
Editing The Truth
We create a novel dataset of Government edits to Wikipedia made by individual government organisations in over 170 countries and explore patterns in government edits. We provide initial evidence showing that high quality government edits are most strongly related to impartial administrations with high quality digital services. Impartial governments with better online services and information provision tend to make contributions that are well written and meet the professional and impartial standards of Wikipedia.
Joint Work with SoDa Labs
Cyber Attacks
Using a dataset of 60 million cyber attacks at the organsiational level I document cyber attacks against government and media organisations between 2008 and 2021. I Investigate the increase in cyber attacks using an event study design around international sanctions.
Research Assistance
Research Assistance
Prof. Yves Zenou (2024) — LLM analysis of open-ended surveys for a Quarterly Journal of Economics publication.
Prof. Michael Ward (2023–2024) — Tools and software supporting academic hiring and promotion decisions.
Prof. Phillip Grossman (2023) — LLM analysis of open-ended survey data.
Teaching
Teaching
Public Economics (ECC4810) — Honours, Masters, PhD, 2024
Community, Market and Government (ECC3146) — Undergraduate, 2024
Political Economy (ECC3870) — Undergraduate and Masters, 2022
Policy Analysis (ATS1051) — Undergraduate, 2022
Applied Young Economist Webinar
Applied Young Economist Webinar
The Applied Young Economist Webinar (AYEW)
AYEW is a webinar series organised jointly by the University of Warwick and Monash University. I bacame a co-organiser of the webinar in 2022
The webinar provides young researches (PhD candidates and post-doctoral fellows) with a virtual platform to interact with peers, discuss research, receive constructive feedback, and expand academic networks. Since it was established in April 2020, it has hosted over 150 webinars, with presenters and participants from around the world.
Sign up to our mailing list here
Follow us on Twitter: @ayew2021
AI Tools
AI Tools
A skill for creating Tikz Diagrams https://github.com/Patrick-Healy/tikz-diagrams-skill
A tool for preparing paper and code for replication before submission to a journal https://github.com/sodalabsio/soda_replicator
A tool to allow your agent to query R, Stata and Python packages https://github.com/Patrick-Healy/package-method-helper-skill
AI & Text As Data
AI & Text As Data
Slides introducing how to use Large Language Models for Financial Sentiment Analysis and analysing open ended sureveys.
Get in touch at patrick.healy2@monash.edu
Get in touch at patrick.healy2@monash.edu
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse