Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Sydney (@USydneyEcon). Macroeconomics and housing research. Associate Editor, New Zealand Economic Papers.

Sydney, Australia
Joined August 2012
Over the moon to be awarded an @arc_gov_au Disovery Early Career Researcher Award! I'll be working on "The Long-Run Macroeconomics of Housing Affordability and Homeownership". Thanks to co-authors, colleagues, @USydneyEcon, and @Sydney_Uni for making this possible.
We’re pleased to announce $102.7M for 200 new projects under the ARC DECRA scheme. From safe social media use & water governance to AI infrastructure, these projects will drive innovation for all Australians. More: arc.gov.au/news-publications…
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James Graham retweeted
I have work in progress with heterogeneous agents but I wouldn’t call it NK because the hallmark of NK models is, IMO, either Calvo or Rotemberg price stickiness. Everything I have worked on replaces artificial restrictions on price adjustment with an indeterminate monetary steady state in which slow price adjustment occurs endogenously. This is a link to the most recent iteration but there will be an updated version soon static1.squarespace.com/stat… The basic insight is that there is an isomorphism between OLG models and HA models and that the multiplicities that characterize OLG models are also ubiquitous in HA models.
Replying to @farmerrf
Do you have some of your work extended to HANK or TANK-like settings?
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Who gets a say in retirement saving within couples? We quantify inequality in spouses’ bargaining power and show how it shapes saving, consumption, and welfare in old age. econometricsociety.org/publi…
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James Graham retweeted
I'm starting a nonfiction book club in Sydney! For round 1 we'll be discussing Waves of Plenty by Mark Cully, a fascinating history of Aus immigration. November 10th in Chippendale, details below- should be fun! Hoping to turn this into a ~monthly thing if we get traction!
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James Graham retweeted
BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” #NobelPrize
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Today, I was lucky to lecture at Harvard on using deep learning to solve economic models. I took the opportunity to update my slides and add new material on optimization, implicit regularization, and double descent. The slide deck is posted here: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slide… The new deck is longer, 156 slides, and I would need around six hours to cover it carefully. So, I welcome any comments or suggestions. I will be teaching the same material next week at Stanford, so any improvement would be fantastic. For instance, today’s students found that my treatment of why expressiveness grows exponentially with depth wasn’t intuitive enough; I need to redesign that part of the deck. I also need to update the semester-long version, which covers much more material. Finally, I am writing a slide deck on reasoning models in economics. Ideas about good sources? I have a preliminary slide deck, but I would rather read more before I post it. Suffice it to say that I find many of the ideas behind reasoning models, such as inference-time compute scaling, quite fascinating. The application of reinforcement learning is also pretty cool, although I am a bit more familiar with that approach. Thanks in advance!
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There are only 9 books you will ever need
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Pretty sure every single one of these is a Public Service Broadcasting album name.
Reading off the lineup at a prog rock festival
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Reading off the lineup at a prog rock festival
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James Graham retweeted
The NSW government's plan for 10,000 new homes at Woollahra is one of the most promising reforms for housing in a generation. Predictably, it's getting hysterical pushback from some of the most privileged people in the country. I went in two-footed on these NIMBYs in the SMH
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James Graham retweeted
From the Beveride curve, this research constructs a Phillips curve that describes inflation as a decreasing and convex function of unemployment, such that the divine coincidence holds, from Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez nber.org/papers/w35804
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James Graham retweeted
The super debate is running hot again. In the latest edition of budget61, Jack Buckley (@JackBuckleyEcon) and Matt Nolan (@ZjubNZ) present new analysis suggesting that in solving an undersaving problem, superannuation may be creating an oversaving one. There’s no doubt that compulsory superannuation is working well in helping Australian’s save for retirement and shift the cost of old age from the taxes of the young to the savings of the old. But with contributions now at 12 per cent, many could end up with much more cash income in retirement than they had while working. The current system increasingly transfers money from when people are young and relatively poor to when they are old and relatively rich. And as balances grow, it risks becoming, in part, a tax-advantaged inheritance scheme. e61.in/too-much-of-a-good-th…
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James Graham retweeted
Replying to @JamesGrahamEcon
I now have. Interesting paper. On ABS data u* = √uv averages about 2.8% since 1979, and v/u has never reached 1: the peak was 0.97 in 2022Q3 (when it should have been well above 1 because we were well past full employment then). So I’m not sure the US calibration carries over cleanly to Australia. The result relies on a roughly unit-elastic Beveridge curve and on measured vacancies being a good proxy for recruiting effort. I’m particularly unconvinced that the Australian job vacancy series measures the recruiting activity the model requires. Put Australia's u and v on a log scale like NBER Fig 1B and they aren't mirror images: vacancies swing far more than unemployment and have trended up for 40 years while unemployment trended down. On Beveridge elasticity: Australia is near -1 only from about 1994 to the mid-2010s, and steeper either side (roughly -1.2 to -1.7). Holding the other assumptions fixed, that would put efficient v/u nearer 0.7–0.8 than 1.
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James Graham retweeted
I have a new working paper on how an economic slowdown tilts the wealth distribution toward older generations through the operation of pension systems. With an empirical application to the European Union.
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Fond memories of Ariel gifting us these posters after passing* his micro midterm exam. *Ariel is as generous in distributing grades as he is with posters.
I am in the USA now and will be happy to ship FREE my "Cafes where one can think poster" to people inside the USA. If you are really intersted, ask through the link on my homepage (see first comment)
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📢 Call for applications! A great opportunity at the Bank of Finland @SuomenPankki — applications are open for the Research Unit Visiting Scholars Programme. We’re delighted to share this opportunity. Full application details below 👇 suomenpankki.fi/en/research/… #CallForApplications #BankOfFinland #CentralBanking #Economics
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If spending more on schools raises the earnings of the children who benefit, does it eventually make the whole economy richer? My new NBER paper examines this using school-finance reforms. 🧵 nber.org/papers/w35755
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James Graham retweeted
Partly puts emphasis back on academic programs that allow students to do "real research" with close faculty support, such as (cough cough) USyd economics honours and MEcA @USydneyEcon @JamesGrahamEcon
Replying to @NorthwesternU
@NorthwesternU Economics department dropping some hard truths about predocs (good!)
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