How cities revive after a large unemployment shock

My masters research centred on working out what helped Australian cities grow employment and what made cities resilient following significant employment decline from 1971 to 2011.

I had two conclusions.

First, Australian cities can smooth and enrich but not escape fundamentals related to size, location, and industrial structure.

Second, there are generally two outcomes from a shock: population or participation decline. Because of social risks, resilient cities adjust with population changes and out-migration rather than lowering labour force participation.

For the Productivity Commission's report on Tranistioning Regional Communities I wrote a short submission based on my work. This is a more accessible version of my thesis.

Data

My dataset comes with a number of caveats and I consider it a work in progress. It is, to my knowledge, the first time a long-term panel dataset of Australian cities has been constructed.

If you would like to use the data, please get in contact.

Applying behavioural insights with firms and in organisations

With co-authors, I am currently working on two papers based on randomised controlled trials ran at the Behavioural Insights Team.

Encouraging firms to adopt beneficial new behaviors: Lessons from a large-scale field experiment

Policymakers are interested in how to encourage firms to adopt beneficial new behaviors. In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment to encourage firms to file their annual accounts electronically and on time. Our intervention involved UK firms filing their annual company accounts to an official registrar of companies. In a randomized controlled trial, we found behaviorally informed letters had no statistically significant effect on encouraging firms to file electronically and a small (2.4%, p=0.053) effect on encouraging compliance with their due date. The trial indicates behavioral science in this context has limited use in influencing firms to adopt new behaviors. We conclude more evidence is required to understand which behavioral interventions will have the most impact on influencing firm behavior in different contexts.

Why change is hard: lessons from nudging managers in the public service

Increasing the motivation and engagement of staff is vital for public service organizations. In turn, managers are acknowledged as a core driver of staff motivation and decision-making. This viewpoint essay summarizes the results of a large-scale randomized controlled trial that sought to test a simple nudge to improve the take-up of leading practice line management. Working in a federated structure with seven departments and agencies, we ran a trial to test the impact of providing more than 2,000 managers with a leading practice line management checklist. The goal of the checklist was to improve line management practices for all employees and close gaps in experience between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and non-BAME employees. We found delivering the leading practice checklist to managers had no statistically significant impact on the line manager-employee relationship. However, the trial provides lessons for how public administrators might seek to improve manager-employee relationships and manager effectiveness going forward.