Research Fellow, Economics Program
In addition to working at the CIS, Stephen is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Sydney. His areas of expertise include monetary and fiscal policy, financial markets, trade and investment and Public Choice. Before joining the CIS, he was an economist with Action Economics, LLC and Director of Economic Research with Standard & Poor’s Institutional Market Services, based in Sydney and Singapore. He has also worked as an adviser to members of the Australian House of Representatives and Senate.
He has lectured in economics at the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and the University of Technology, Sydney. He has a BA (Hons) from the Australian National University, a Master of Economics (Hons) from Macquarie University and a PhD in economics from the University of New South Wales.
Stephen also has his own blogsite http://www.institutional-economics.com Please note that the views expressed on the blog site are not necessarily endorsed by the CIS.
Author Archive
Posted: 9:54 am on 14th May 2012
New FIRB chairman Brian Wilson promises greater openness in an interview with Glenda Korporaal: The former investment banker, who has been on the board of FIRB since 2009 and took over as chairman last month, says FIRB is making a greater effort to communicate the government’s foreign investment policies through its website and in briefing sessions for advisers. “It is important for all our constituencies — the Australian public, Australian…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 12th May 2012
The federal government’s stated motivation for returning the budget to surplus next financial year is to give the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) ‘maximum room to move’ on interest rates. Yet a fiscal contraction is no more effective in restraining the economy than a fiscal expansion is effective in stimulating it. In an open economy with a floating exchange rate and an inflation-targeting central bank, changes in fiscal policy do…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 21st April 2012
Monetary policy has recently come in for criticism from a number of quarters. Paul Howes of the Australian Workers’ Union said, ‘the Reserve Bank has made the wrong call consistently’ and called for its charter to be changed. The only relevant test for monetary policy is inflation outcomes. The ‘core’ measures of inflation that best predict future inflation have been consistent with the 2–3% inflation target since the September quarter…
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Posted: 12:21 pm on 16th March 2012
Former Treasurer Peter Costello says that the Future Fund he created is a ‘prime sovereign wealth fund’ and ‘probably the most respected’ in the world. But that is not the conclusion of the Washington think-tank the Peterson Institute, which has compiled the most comprehensive international ranking of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). The Peterson Institute gave the Future Fund a score of only 80 out of 100, which is below the…
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Posted: 10:55 am on 13th March 2012
Trade minister Craig Emerson has called for increased foreign direct investment in agriculture, in contrast to the federal Coalition’s calls for increased Foreign Investment Review Board scrutiny of foreign investment in the sector. It is one of the few acts of political leadership in this policy area since the late 1980s. It is hard to believe now, but in the 1980s there was something of a bidding war between the…
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