Discipline of Economics

Behnam a PhD student with an MSc in Energy Engineering from Sapienza University of Rome and a BSc in Industrial Engineering from Azad University. His academic and research experience covers renewable energy systems, electricity markets, photovoltaic technologies, battery storage, smart grids, and energy economics. At Sapienza University, he worked on projects involving techno economic impacts of photovoltaic curtailment, and electricity price behaviour in Spain. He also worked as a research assistant, using ImageJ and machine-learning techniques to analyse 13,200 microscope images of solar-panel soiling. His professional experience includes renewable-energy research on smart energy systems, market design, renewable integration, and data-driven modelling, as well as quality-control work in industry.

His PhD supervisor is Professor Christina Sklibosios Nikitopoulos.

His research interests include electricity markets, electricity-price modelling, renewable-energy integration, photovoltaic curtailment, battery energy storage.

PhD topic: Economic and Market Impacts of 4-Hour Li-ion Battery Storage for Mitigating PV Curtailment in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).

His teaching areas include Energy Economics and Electricity Markets; Operations and Production Planning; Business Analytics and Quantitative Methods; and Sustainable Energy and Market Policy.

Professor Mikhail Anufriev (https://sites.google.com/view/anufriev) is an expert in bounded rationality and learning, experimental and behavioural economics, agent modelling, and complexity theory.

His work aims to improve our understanding of the economic processes by focusing on feedback loops between individual choices and aggregate market dynamics. It contributes to the growing area of heterogeneous agent modelling including theories of endogenous bubbles and crashes in financial market.

Professor Anufriev has recently published on the theoretical and empirical investigation of economic and social networks, as well as on wealth evolution in the models with heterogeneous expectations.

Mikhail's work has been published in leading economics journals including the Journal of the European Economic Association, the American Economic Journal: Micro, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

He is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, a member of editorial board of the Review of Behavioural Economics, and an associate editor of the annual special issue on macroeconomics and development of Industrial and Corporate Change.

Professor Anufriev was Head of the Economics Department in the UTS Business School from 2016 to 2021.

Michelle Baddeley is an applied economist specialising in social and behavioural economics focussing on themes including jury bias, expert opinion, migration, vulnerable work; and energy and the environment.

Michelle has taught and supervised across a wide range of economics and finance subjects and has published across a wide range of journals. Her books include Behavioural Economics – A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), Behavioural Economics and Finance (Routledge, 2nd edition in 2018) and Copycats and Contrarians – Why We Follow Others and When We Don’t (Yale University Press).

Dr. Christopher Bajada is a Professor of Economics with expertise in applied macroeconomics, specialising in the circular economy, business cycles, economic measurement, tax compliance, and management practices. He is the Research Director of the Centre for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics (BIDA), where he leads a multidisciplinary team in translating complex data into actionable strategies that help businesses and governments make informed strategic decisions. Additionally, he serves as the Associate Editor of the journal, Advances in Economics Education, and is the Director of the Bachelor of Economics at UTS.

Professor Bajada has authored several research books, academic textbooks, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles. He has successfully secured numerous competitive research grants, including funding from the Australian Research Council and various state and Commonwealth government agencies. With extensive experience in industry and government consulting, he has conducted research for several organisations, including the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment; the Office of the Chief Economist (Canberra); the Australian Bureau of Statistics; the Export Council of Australia; Deloitte Access Economics; the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage; the National Association of Testing Authorities; the Asian Productivity Organisation (Tokyo); Cotton Research Development Corporation; and the NSW Innovation and Productivity Council.

In the field of education, Professor Bajada has played a key role in shaping Economics Learning Standards for Australian Higher Education and the NSW Economics HSC Curriculum (2027). He previously served as Associate Dean (Education) at the UTS Business School and chaired the UTS Teaching and Learning Committee. He has taught economics across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, and Shanghai, including the Executive MBA, with teaching spanning microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. Recognised for his outstanding teaching, Chris has received both the University’s Teaching Excellence Award and a National Citation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning in Higher Education. He has also supervised numerous Honours and PhD students.

Professor Bajada has held several external appointments, including serving as a Council Member of the Economic Society of Australia (NSW Branch), a member of the Australian Taxation Office’s Cash Economy Task Force, and a member of the expert committee responsible for developing national Economics Learning Standards for Higher Education in Australia.

Jemma Briscoe is an Adjunct Lecturer in Finance at the University of Technology Sydney, where she has taught in the School of Finance since 2007. She is also a PhD candidate researching financial elder abuse and the misuse of Enduring Powers of Attorney.

Alongside her academic work, Jemma is Director and Head of Research and Technical Advice at Aged Care Gurus. She researches retirement living, aged care and what drives consumer decisions, including how Centrelink and aged-care funding rules work together in Australia. She develops and delivers accredited education on retirement living and aged care for financial planners, lawyers and accountants. She also presents to the executive leadership teams of for-profit and not-for-profit aged-care providers and retirement village operators, and helps boards understand how consumers make financial decisions and how those decisions interact with social security and aged-care services.

Earlier in her career, she worked in research and strategy at the Commonwealth Bank, consulted at Accenture and ran her own consulting firm for eight years.  Jemma holds a Master of Applied Finance (Macquarie University) and a Bachelor of Business in Accounting (UTS), and is a CPA.

I research how behavioural science can improve the use of artificial intelligence, creating more human-centred AI systems, particularly in financial services. I also research how we can strengthen applied behavioural economics through improved theories and research methods.

I have a PhD from the University of Western Australia. My PhD research focussed on the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology.

Before joining UTS, I co-founded and led PwC Australia’s behavioural economics practice, and built and led data science and consumer insights teams at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). I also worked as a lawyer, environmental campaigner, and an economic policy adviser with the Australian Treasury

I blog at https://blog.jcx.au.

Corrado is Associate Professor at the Economics Discipline Group. He joined UTS in 2008 as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow. His research interests are financial macroeconomics and computational economics. 
Corrado has published several papers in international refereed journals and two books.
He is presently co-director of the program in Behavioural Macroeconomics and Complexity at the Centre of Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at ANU, Research fellow at the Center for Computational Social Science (CCSS) at Kobe University, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational Social Science.

Personal website and up-to-date CV:https://sites.google.com/site/corradodiguilmi/

RePEc page

Google Scholar citation page

Personal web page

Peter has taught economics at the University of Technology Sydney for more than twenty years. He holds a Ph.D. in monetary economics and the history of economic thought from the University of Sydney. This research surveyed the analytical role of an endogenously determined money supply in the history of economic thought, particularly focusing on the economics of Knut Wicksell, J.M. Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor. It also incorporated endogenous money into a macroeconomic model to provide a monetary explanation of long-period employment. Peter's ongoing research interests include the development of Post-Keynesian macro models and their application to understanding monetary policy, financial crises and policy responses to financial crises including macro-prudential regulation. He also works on Australian monetary and banking history, and has a strong interest in ethical perspectives on economics including the relationship between theologically-grounded ethics and economic thinking. He is the author of Money and Employment: A Study of the Theoretical Implications of Endogenous Money published by Edward Elgar in 2005. He has also published articles in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Review of Political Economy, the Journal of Financial Stability, the Review of Keynesian Economics and Metroeconomica.

Peter currently teaches courses in economic principles, macroeconomics, monetary economics and international trade. He has also taught corporate finance and banking. He has a strong interest in economics education in addition to his main fields of research and has published in the Journal of Economic Education, and Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. He is currently editor of Advances in Economics Education published by Edward Elgar. 

Peter has held academic appointments at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales as well as at the University of Technology Sydney. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Ottawa in Canada, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the United States, and Osaka Prefecture University in Japan.

Mario joined the School of Economics in August 2007 after completing his PhD in Economics at University College London, where he explored The Role of Cognitive Skills on Educational and Labour Market Outcomes. His research and teaching interests lie in Labour Economics, Public Economics, and Applied Econometrics.

Mario’s research has been widely cited and published in leading international journals, including Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and Economics of Education Review.

He has taught at all levels, from introductory undergraduate economics to Honours and PhD courses. His excellence in teaching has earned him multiple nominations in the UTS Business School's Top Subject and Teachers List.

Mario has supervised several Honours students, many of whom achieved First-Class Honours and secured positions in prestigious organizations such as NSW Treasury, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and Oxford Economics Australia.

Beyond teaching and research, Mario is actively involved in academic leadership at UTS, having held key positions, including:

•     Academic Board Teaching and Learning Committee
•     Business School Teaching and Learning Committee
•     Business School Faculty Board
•     Director of Undergraduate Studies (Economics Department)
•     Economics Honours Program Coordinator

To visit Mario personal web page click here.

Esther Mirjam is an applied economist and DECRA fellow whose research spans labour, development and family economics. Her work examines how people make choices about education, job search, work, migration and fertility, and how public policies shape these individual choices and the economy at large. Her current research centers on young graduates and labour markets in West Africa, supported by a large-scale field-based data collection initiative. She also studies domestic violence, maternity leave policies and vocational education in high-income countries.

Dr. Elif Incekara-Hafalir is a Behavioral Economist employing experimental methods to research individual decision-making processes and their impact on crucial life outcomes such as education, employment, and wealth. With a passion for bridging theory with real-world applications, she actively seeks to utilize Behavioral Economics principles to address societal challenges, aiming to mitigate inequality, enhance gender equity, and foster positive outcomes for marginalized populations.

With a track record of impactful research, Dr. Incekara-Hafalir has made significant contributions to the field, with publications in elite journals including Management Science and Experimental Economics. Her expertise extends to conducting lab and field experiments, where she has accumulated invaluable experience.

Notably, Elif has secured substantial external funding from prestigious institutions such as the National Institute of Aging, through Penn CMU Roybal Center on Behavioral Economics and Health, and the Evidence for Policy Design Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. With her innovative approach and dedication, she is committed to fostering positive social change.

Her website is https://sites.google.com/site/incekara/

Dr Nathan Kettlewell is a Associate Professor in the Economics Department at UTS. His research aims to improve people’s economic and social welfare, either by informing better policy decisions, or helping people to make better informed choices. He is an applied microeconomist who has written many papers in the areas of private health insurance, economic preferences, and mental wellbeing. His research on private health insurance explores topics related to consumer wellbeing and public finance, such as the role of government incentives on demand for private insurance, how insurance affects demand for healthcare, and the rationality of consumer behaviour. His research on economic preferences aims to understand why we make the decisions we do by uncovering the causes of individual variation in decision making traits, like risk aversion and trust. 

Nathan created and is responsible for the Australian Twins Economic Preferences Survey (ATEPS) – a survey of more than 1,100 adult twins, which aims to investigate the role of genes and environment on the formation of decision-making traits. ATEPS is supported by funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, and from UTS.

In 2022, Nathan was awarded the Rising Star Award by the Australian Health Economics Society, recognising him as “a person whose work is beginning to make a significant impact nationally and internationally, reflecting either scientific excellence or policy impact (or both).” He has also received the UTS Business School Research Award for Early Career Academics (2022), the Research with Relevance award (2024) and the Engaged People award (2024). 

Nathan’s research has been published in leading economics journals such as Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Journal of Health Economics. He is a research affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

Nathan joined UTS in October 2019. He obtained his PhD from the UNSW Sydney in 2017, and worked at the University of Sydney between 2017-2019.

I am a lecturer of Economics Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney. I have received PhD from the University of Chicago.

Gordon Menzies is a College Lecturer (tutor) at Regent's Park College (Oxford University), and an adjunct Associate Professor in Economics at UTS.

After obtaining a First Class Honours degree from the University of New England in 1985, Gordon worked as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) until 2002. He was present during the transformation of the Australian economy under the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments, and was seconded to the Federal Treasury in the mid-1990s to advise on modelling Australia's liberalised financial sector for forecasting and policymaking. He was at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) over 2003 to 2026.

His published work includes articles in leading journals such as Experimental Economics and the Journal of Business Ethics. His academic distinctions include the Robert Jones Prize as the top-scoring Economics Master's student at the Australian National University (1996), a Commonwealth Scholarship for doctoral study at Oxford (1998-2001), the jointly awarded Arrow Prize for the best economics research paper in Berkeley Electronic Journals (2009), the UTS Individual Teaching Award as the university's best teacher (2008), and an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation recognising his contribution to teaching the "human side" of economics (2009).

Across a career spanning central banking, public policy, university teaching and interdisciplinary scholarship, Gordon has sought to connect economics with broader questions of ethics, culture, theology and public life. His work combines academic research, public engagement and a commitment to making complex ideas accessible to a wide audience.

Professor Peter Siminski is an applied microeconomist and has over 20 years of policy-oriented research experience. His research is in Applied Microeconomics and Microeconometrics in the fields of inequality and economic mobility, applied econometrics, program evaluation, education, health, labour and public economics. 

Peter holds a PhD in Economics (UNSW), after majoring in Economics, Mathematics, Sociology and Social Policy. He joined UTS in 2017 following stints at the University of Wollongong and UNSW. He has been an IZA Institute of Labor Economics Research Fellow since 2012.

Much of Peter’s work applies modern impact evaluation techniques to estimate the causal effects of Australian government policies and programs on people’s lives. The measurement of inequality and intergenerational economic mobility is a key theme of his work.

Peter has published over 40 articles in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is Associate Editor of the Economic Record and is on the Editorial Board of the Economics of Education Review. He has taught impact evaluation methods, applied microeconometrics and causal inference to undergraduate and postgraduate students since 2009.

Peter has won multiple research grants and contracts totaling over $1.8 million, including an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and an ARC Discovery Grant.

While maintaining his strong focus on research and teaching, Peter engages regularly with government and industry, including via consultancy and training. He regularly writes for The Conversation.

Peter has received many honours and awards for his work including Best Paper Prize among papers published in Economic Record (2022 & 2009) and a UTS Business School Innovation Award (alongside colleagues) in 2023.

Olena Stavrunova is an Associate Professor in the Economics Discipline Group at UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney. She has over 15 years of research experience in health economics and econometrics, with a particular focus on understanding how health policies, healthcare system settings, and external shocks influence health-related behaviours, healthcare use, and economic outcomes.

Her research has examined a range of health policy issues in Australia and the United States, including elective surgery waiting times and their effects on healthcare use and private health insurance, socioeconomic inequalities in access to healthcare, the influence of policy settings on private health insurance uptake, and the health and economic impacts of natural disasters in Australia. She has extensive expertise in the analysis of Australian healthcare data and has contributed to several research projects examining elective surgery waiting times, including as a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project.

Olena has published in leading international journals. Her research has received several prestigious awards, including the Aigner Award for the best paper in empirical econometrics published in the Journal of Econometrics and the Australian Health Economics Society Research Prize for the best Australian health economics paper. 

In addition to her research, Olena has held several academic leadership and management roles at UTS, including Acting Head and Deputy Head of the Economics Discipline Group and Program Director of the Bachelor of Economics. 

Toru Suzuki received his Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University. He is a microeconomic theorist with wide interests ranging from communication, language, persuasion, and information aggregation to voting and behavioral decision-making. His research develops novel approaches to understanding interaction and choice, and he has published single-authored papers in leading journals, including Theoretical Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior.