My university-formatted publication list is here https://www.uts.edu.au/staff/gordon.menzies
but what I’ve done underneath is organize my research by the narrative of my work-life.
MACROECONOMICS
My basic training and work experience was as a macro-economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia, from 1986 to 2003. This was a terrific place to learn about practical policymaking, and, on the technical side, I specialized in econometric modelling, exchange rates and trade. A highlight for me was a secondment to the Federal Treasury in 1994 to build a financial sector in their macroeconomic model. Most of my work at the time was in-house, but here are some publication highlights.
Menzies, G. D. (1994). Explaining the Timing of Australia's Manufactured Export Boom. The Australian Economic Review, 27 (4), 72-87.
Gruen, D. & Menzies, G. D. (1995). Forward Discount Bias: Is it Near-rationality in the Foreign Exchange Market? The Economic Record, 71 (213), 157-166.
The RBA sponsored me to undertake a Masters at the Australian National University in 1996, where I won a prize for the best student (the Robert Jones Prize). On the back of that, the university nominated me for a Commonwealth scholarship, which then allowed me to study at Oxford, where my DPhil was on the Asian Financial Crisis.
I joined UTS in 2003, and have continued to work on macroeconomic modelling.
Dvornak, N., Kohler, M., & Menzies, G. D. (2005). Australia's Medium-Run Exchange Rate: A Macroeconomic Balance Approach. The Economic Record, 81 (253), 101-112
Menzies, G. D., Xiao, X., Dixon, P., Peng, L., & Rimmer, M. (2016). Rural led exchange rate appreciation in China. China Economic Review. 39, 15-30
SUDDEN CHANGES IN BELIEFS
I won an international prize, with my colleague Daniel Zizzo, on a model of belief formation where people can have dramatic shifts in beliefs in response to trivial information, because this seems to be what happens in some financial crises. Here is the paper that won the Arrow prize:
Menzies, G. D. & Zizzo, D. (2009). Inferential Expectations. The Berkeley Electronic Journal of Macroeconomics, 9 (1), 1-25.
This paper formed the basis of subsequent work on exchange rates, central banks, and legal decisions about competition.
Henckel, T., Menzies, G., Prokhovnik, N., & Zizzo, D. J. (2011). Barro-Gordon Revisited: Reputational Equilibria with Inferential Expectations. Economics Letters, 112 (2), 144-147.
Lyons, B., Menzies, G. D., & Zizzo, D. J. (2012). Conflicting evidence and decisions by agency professionals: an experimental test in the context of merger regulation. Theory and Decision.
Menzies, G. D. & Zizzo, D. J. (2012). Monetary Policy and Inferential Expectations of Exchange Rates. Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money.
TEACHING
My whole time at UTS I have been active in teaching scholarship:
Menzies, G. D. (2009). Emotion and Empathy as Pedagogical Tools: Instructive Activities in Teaching International and Developmental Economics. Australasian Journal of Economics Education, 6 (1), 38-51.
Bush, S., Menzies, G., & Thorp, S. (2009). An Array of Online Teaching Tools. Teaching Statistics, 31 (1), 17-20.
I have also been an active teacher, winning in 2008 the UTS teaching award ‘For approaches to learning and teaching that inspire and challenge students to understand diverse perspectives, and to see a 'human' side to International Economics.’ The following year, 2009, I won an Australian Learning and Teaching Council citation for the same material.
Since then, my undergraduate teaching has been recognised in a variety of awards in each of 2010, 2013-2014 and 2016-2017.
As well as my mainstream work, I have had a more critical strand of research which relates to the dangers of the market for culture and inequality, and what might be needed to respond to these challenges.
DANGERS OF THE MARKET:
Economic thinking seeping into culture
Menzies, G. D. & Hay, D. (2012). Self and Neighbours. The Economic Record.
Menzies, G. D. & Hay, D. (2008). Economics and the Marriage Wars. Faith and economics, 51 (Spring), 1-29.
Menzies, G. D. (2008). Economics as Identity. In Ian Harper and Samuel Gregg (Eds.), Christian Morality and Market Economics: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives (pp. 94-109). Edward Elgar.
Menzies, G. D. (2015). Stop the Boats: Do the Ends Justify the Means? Economic Papers: a journal of applied economics and policy, 34 (4), 229-242, doi: 10.1111/1759-3441.12113.
The latter paper, about the use of cost benefit analysis for refugee policy, was written up in six national newspapers: the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, Western Australian and Brisbane Times. It is described here:
2015: ABC Internet Post: Do Ends Justify Means: Australia's Unprincipled Refugee Policy http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/11/03/4344251.htm
Inequality
Brennan, G., Menzies, G. D., & Munger, M. (2014). "A Brief History of Equality."
https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/brennan%20menzies%20munger%205%20%281%29.pdf
This paper, cited by the late Tony Atkinson in his book on inequality http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674504769 contains a very simple idea: Prior to the industrial revolution, rich families had more surviving children than poor families, and so the division of resources among children created an equalizing pressure in subsequent generations. That is, well-off people have more children to divide their wealth among more recipients. Now, in a country like Australia, richer people have fewer children, so that equalizing force is gone and wealth will become more concentrated in subsequent generations. The future does not look good for inequality unless there are active policies to address it.
TAMING THE MARKET:
Taxation
I have a number of posts exploring the morality and practicality of taxation.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/05/13/4235192.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/06/30/4492025.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/2016-02-04/7133796
Handling Debt
The accumulation of debt sometimes leaves individuals, or even nations, in powerless positions, so that it becomes in everyone’s interests to relieve debt.
Menzies, G. D. (2004). First-best debt relief. Economics Letters, 82 (3), 301-306.
Menzies, G. D. & Vines, D. (2008). The Transfer Problem and Real Exchange Rate Overshooting in Financial Crises: The Role of the Debt Servicing Multiplier. Review of International Economics, 16 (4), 709-727.
And I am a fan of Australia’s use of debt to fund higher education. So much so, that at the end of the mining boom I wrote a piece with the founder of HECS, Bruce Chapman, on a creative use of the HECS framework in other contexts.
https://theconversation.com/hecs-for-the-unemployed-a-finance-answer-to-minings-decline-28405
Regulation
I was an invited contributor to the 2014 Murray Financial System Inquiry, and the subsequently published article is explained in the link below.
2014: Menzies, G. D.,, Dixon, P.B.,, & Rimmer, M., Removing Red Tape Regulation in an Uncertain Environment., submitted to Financial System Inquiry.
Menzies, G., Dixon, P., & Rimmer, M. (2016). In Praise of (Some) Red Tape: A New Approach to Regulation. Economic Record, 92 (299), 631 - 647.
2015 - Press writeup of CIFR research: 'Regulation Assessors should have Independence' by Malarika Santhebenner in Money Management https://www.moneymanagement.com.au/news/policy-regulation/regulation-assessers-should-have-independence-cifr?qt-comments=1
In our work for the Murray Inquiry we also examined the costs to the banking sector of misallocating resources through poor lending, and this too was published.
2014: Menzies, G. D., The Allocative Efficiency Costs of Misdirected Capital., submitted to Financial System Inquiry.
Menzies, G. D., Bird, R., Dixon, P., & Rimmer, M. (2011). Asset Price Regulators Unite: You Have the Macroeconomy to Win and the Microeconomic Losses are Small. The Economic Record, 33 (4), 552-567.
Bird, R., Dixon, P., Menzies, G. D., & Rimmer, M. (2010). The Economic Costs of US Stock
Mispricing. Journal of Policy Modelling, 33 (4), 552-567.
In 2016/7 I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. I worked on restoring trust in finance, with Professor Vines, from the Political Economy of Financial Markets Group, St Antony’s college. The results of our work were explained in my public lecture on the 21st of February.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/621
AND NOW?...
Going forward, I will continue working on all these, but in my opinion there is a pressing need to research the cultural and ethical impacts of the widespread use of markets and economic thinking.