Top economist joins La Trobe
Professor Harding.
Professor Don Harding has won an award for having the most citations for economics research in Australia, reflecting the impact and influence of his work.
The recognition – part of the latest Thompson Scientific Citation Awards presented at the National Press Club in Canberra in April – places Professor Harding in the top ten 'most cited' researchers in Australia.
Thompson Scientific is one of the world largest publishers of academic research. Each year it measures the number of times a researcher is cited, or quoted, by peers in the pages of its journals. According to this data Australia ranks among the top ten nations for the influence of its scientific papers.
Professor Harding's five research papers were cited sixty-four times, with 12.8 citations per paper, making him the leader in his field of economics.
A regular commentator on economic issues, Professor Harding is co-creator of a widely-used monthly measure of Australian inflation. He joined La Trobe earlier this year, further boosting the capacities of the Department of Economics and Finance and its already internationally renowned group of research staff.
Founded forty years ago, the Department has a broad range of strengths, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic modelling, economic methodology, economic policy, development, and agricultural and resource economics. Its research has gained international prominence and helped build a strong reputation for the University. For example, the ORANI model – the first computable general equilibrium model of an entire economy with direct policy applications – was developed at La Trobe.
Professor Harding says the breadth of the Department's research and policy interests is one of its great strengths and makes it a very attractive working environment for applied economists.
A graduate from Yale in 2003, Professor Harding came to La Trobe from the University of Melbourne. Before that he was a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Institute and Director of its Centre for Business Cycle Research.
Prior to becoming an academic, Professor Harding gained policy experience as head of policy research in the Australian Treasury, the Industry Assistance Commission (now Productivity Commission) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
His main research interests are in macroeconomics and applied econometrics, with a strong focus on the business cycle.
Professor Harding is a fellow of the European Area Business Cycle Network and, with Professor Heather Anderson, a director of the macro-econometric models and methods program in the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis.
Much of his work investigating the measurement and analysis of business cycles has been concerned with how to provide turning-point-based measures of the cycle with an econometric foundation. He has applied this econometric framework to test various explanations of the business cycle.
Professor Harding has considerable experience with survey techniques, gained at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and at the Melbourne Institute where he managed the Consumer Sentiment Survey for eight years.
He uses survey data to study issues where data from official sources is unavailable or inadequate. This includes areas as diverse as the effect of petrol prices on consumer spending, the effects of unfair dismissal laws and the effects of minimum wages.
The most notable example of his innovative use of survey data in macroeconomic analysis and policy is the TD Securities-Melbourne Institute Inflation Gauge which he jointly created with Stephen Koukoulas of TD Securities and Dr Lei Lei Song of the Melbourne Institute.
'This seeks to fill the gap that occurs because the ABS produces quarterly measures of inflation only. The Inflation Gauge provides a monthly measure of consumer price inflation using an innovative web-based survey of prices,' he says.
The Gauge also provides data-based forecasts of ABS inflation which are available eight weeks in advance of the ABS measure. Over the past five years, these have had an average error of one thousandth of one per cent and a standard deviation of thirty hundredths of one per cent. Because of its accuracy and timeliness, the Inflation Gauge is closely watched by the finance sector and policy makers.