Top behavioural economist Lionel Page, from QUT’s School of Economics and Finance, has been named the 2016 Young Economist of the Year, an award that honours the best “Australian economist under the age of 40 who is deemed to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”.
Professor Page, who heads the Queensland Behavioural Economics Group at QUT, said behavioural economics was a fast-growing field of research.
“Behavioural economics draws from standard economics and psychology to investigate how people make economic decisions and how to help them make better ones,” he said.
“The Federal Government has established a ‘behavioural economics’ team of advisers in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to help design policies using insights from behavioural economics.”
Professor Page’s research spans a variety of topics from education to finance.
In education, he has looked at the effect for children of being born just before or after the school cut-off date in Queensland and New South Wales.
“The research team conducted a large study and found that students born just after the school cut-off date and who were the eldest in their classrooms tended to be more likely to enjoy competitive environments.
“These facts add to a large body of evidence showing long-term advantages of having been relative old at school in competitive professional environments such as top managerial positions or professional sport.”
Professor Page’s behavioural finance research has also contributed to further understanding of the irrational exuberance of markets in times of boom and bust.
He found that the administration of the stress hormone, cortisol, to economics students increased significantly their risk aversion and decreased their appetite for financial risk taking.
“This result followed evidence that financial traders see their level of cortisol rise substantially in times of crisis and high volatility. The effect of stress on traders’ risk aversion can explain why markets become overly risk-averse in time of crisis after periods of insouciance.
“These changes in risk attitudes feed financial markets instability with potentially substantial economic costs for the real economy.”
In sport, Professor Page’s research found that cricket batsmen behave as predicted by economic theory and strategically reduce their risk-taking when approaching centuries and half-centuries to increase their chances of reaching these benchmarks.
This research, published in the prestigious American Economic Review shows that even in the case of collective sports, individual incentives can still influence players’ behaviour, with potentially negative consequences for the team as a whole.
Professor Page received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, a highly competitive award supporting excellence in research from young researchers in Australia, and a Queensland Smart Future Fellowship from the Queensland Government, both in 2012.
The Young Economist award is considered one of Australia’s most prestigious economics prizes in economics. The Economic Society of Australia grants such awards on average once every two years. Previous recipients include Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh (2011) and ARC Future Fellow Paul Frijters (2009).
Professor Page completed his undergraduate studies at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Cachan and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique de l’Analyse Economique before graduating with a PhD from the Paris School of Economics in 2006. He joined QUT in 2010.
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