Team

Leadership

Richard Holden is Vice-Chancellor’s Professor and Chief Societal Economist at UNSW, Director of the Manos Institute for Cognitive Economics, and President Emeritus of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Prior to that he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received an AM and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. His research focuses on contract theory, organizational economics, law and economics, and political economy. He has written on topics including: network capital, political districting, the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, voting rules, and blockchain. His most recent work is on human cognition.

Professor Holden has published in top general interest journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and Nature. He is currently editor of the Journal of Law and Economics.

He has been a Visiting Professor of Economics at the MIT Department of Economics and the MIT Sloan School of Management, Visiting Professor of Economics at the Harvard Economics Department, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW, a Distinguished Fellow of the Luohan Academy, and a Senior Academic Fellow at the e61 Institute.

His research has been featured in press articles in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and The New Republic. Professor Holden appears regularly as a media commentator, and has published opinion pieces in outlets including the Australian Financial Review, the Australian, the New York Times, The New Republic, Times Higher Education, and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review.

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Robert Akerlof is a Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School.

He is a core member of ERINN (Economic Research on Identity, Norms, and Narratives), a research affiliate of CEPR (the Centre for Economic Policy Research), and a co-editor at the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

He received my PhD from Harvard in 2009, where he was a Presidential Scholar.

His main areas of research are cognitive economics, sociology and economics, organizational economics, and applied microeconomic theory. My work focuses, in particular, on the importance of social interaction.

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Researchers

Hongyi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at UNSW Sydney. His main research area is applied microeconomic theory, with a particular interest in organisational economics. He received his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2011.

DJ Thornton joins the Manos Institute for Cognitive Economics as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He completed his doctoral studies in Economics at UNSW Sydney, where his research focused on collective action problems in social networks, and, more recently, cognitive economics.

Predoctoral Fellows

Research Assistants

Affiliated Researchers

Professor of Finance, UNSW Business School

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Alumni

Administration

Advisory Board

Richard H. Thaler is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is the former faculty director of the Center for Decision Research (CDR), a Governing Board member of the CDR, and the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mel Silva is the VP and Managing Director for Google Australia and New Zealand.

She is responsible for ensuring the organisation delivers on Google’s mission for users and the community, supporting the amazing teams in both countries, and overseeing the work it does across sales, partnerships and platforms to help businesses grow.

Since joining Google in 2007, she has held a number of senior roles in Australia and APAC region. Prior to coming home to Sydney in 2018, Mel and her family spent two years in Singapore, where she was responsible for Google’s Go to Market Strategy & Operations team across APAC.

Andrei Shleifer is John L. Loeb Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT. Before coming to Harvard in 1991, he has taught at Princeton and the Chicago Business School. Shleifer has worked in the areas of comparative corporate governance, law and finance, behavioral finance, as well as institutional economics. He has published seven books, including The Grabbing Hand (with Robert Vishny), Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance, and A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility (with Nicola Gennaioli), as well as over a hundred articles. Shleifer is an Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Finance Association. In 1999, Shleifer won the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association.  According to RePEc, Shleifer is the most cited economist in the world.

My name is Brian Schmidt, and I am an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, formerly known as Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories. I work in several areas of astronomy, most notably with exploding stars called supernovae. But I also chase after Gamma Ray Bursts, and am heading a project to build a new Telescope which will map the Southern Sky called SkyMapper!

 

Kate has significant experience in matters relating to strategy, capital allocation, stakeholder management and sustainability. During her executive career, she held senior roles with Fidelity International, AMP Capital, AMP Limited and Boston Consulting Group.

Kate is currently a Member of the Finance & Strategy Committee and Investments Subcommittee of the University of New South Wales, the Investment Committee of the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, and the Investment Committee of River Capital, a multi-asset boutique fund manager. She is also a Director of The Hunger Project Australia and a Senior Advisor to Boston Consulting Group.