My name is Eamon McGinn. I live in Sydney, Australia.
I work at Deloitte Access Economics. I'm a Director and my work mostly covers economic aspects of transport, infrastructure and energy. I use quantitative microeconomic modelling to answer business and policy questions. This includes policy simulation, cost benefit analysis and forecasting. I mostly work on infrastructure intensive industries such as transport, energy and mining.
Before working at Deloitte I worked at the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
I am currently undertaking a PhD in economics at University of Technology Sydney. I anticipate completion in 2020. I've been awarded the Ross Milbourne Research Scholarship in Economics. My research applies econometrics to questions in political economics - particularly voter and politician behaviour. I have tutored in public economics, global economy and environmental economics.
I have an undergraduate degree in Commerce with Honours in Economics from The University of Sydney. I was awarded the Jack Tilburn Honours Scholarship and my honours thesis focussed on mechanisms for cooperation in repeated games. I tutored classes in introductory Microeconomics, introductory Macroeconomics and Political Economy.
I also have a Masters degree in Economics from the University of NSW. I focussed on Microeconomics and Econometrics. A term paper produced as part of the degree was published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports in 2013.
On the side, I completed a Graduate Diploma of Brewing at Federation University.
Journal Articles
The team batting second in a day-night cricket match faces different playing conditions to the team batting first. This paper quantifies the effect on the runscoring ability of the team batting second by using the difference in differences estimator. This approach indicates that batting during the evening reduces the expected number of runs scored per over by 0.2. The effect explains around 12% of the total margin of loss for teams in the treatment group who lose the match. It is also found that batting during the evening increases the expected number of wickets lost at any given point in the innings.
Working Papers
American elections almost always use a First Past the Post (FPTP) system for electing candidates. Moving to a ranked choice/instant run-off vote (IRV) approach has been suggested by a number of advocacy groups to improve the electoral system. Currently, IRV is only used in a small number of municipal elections in the United States but this number has grown significantly over the last ten years. There are mixed findings in the literature on the benefits of IRV for voters and politicians, this makes informed debate around its adoption challenging. Analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro Area indicates that the introduction of IRV caused a 9.6 percentage point increase in turnout for Mayoral elections, on average. The effect on turnout is larger for precincts that have higher poverty rates. Text based sentiment analysis on mayoral debates in a broader set of cities across the U.S. indicates that the introduction of IRV improved the civility of debates with candidates substituting negative or neutral words for positive words.
Polarization of politicians and the electorate is endemic in the current popular discussion of politics. However, there is a mix of empirical findings on whether polarization is actually occurring and no consensus on its cause. In this paper I adapt a simple model of political behavior to be applicable to a recent politically charged moment in Australia –- a national vote on same sex marriage. I apply a text as data approach to analyse the debate in parliament that followed the vote. Measuring the degree of support or opposition to SSM in speeches over time indicates that politicians who were ideologically opposed to SSM strengthened their opposition regardless of how their electorate voted while supporters of SSM did not change their behavior. This result indicates that polarization did occur and that the polarizing behavior is consistent with differences in political ideology being associated with differences in prior beliefs about the state of the world. In particular, although the national vote was in favor of SSM, the results seem to have provided information to Opposers of SSM that their position was more widely supported than previously believed, leading them to increase the strength of their opposition to SSM.
Voter turnout in mature democracies tends to range from around 50-70%. Low, for something as critical as electing policymakers, but much higher than basic economic theory would predict. Even in Australia, where voting is compulsory, there are still around 5-6% of voters who submit an informal vote, which does not count towards the total. We make use of a natural experiment, based on exogenous changes in electorate boundaries, to identify what factors influence the decision to waste a vote. In an advance from the existing literature, we are able to test a range of potential contributing factors together, in a single model, and with causal interpretation. We find that factors that feature in the traditional theory on voter decisions, competitiveness and number of other voters, do not affect the rate of informal voting. Instead we find that more candidates on the ballot results in higher levels of informal voting. This effect is present regardless of level of education, which indicates that it is likely to be associated with a decision by the voter to abstain rather than an error. We conclude that making the way voters can express their preferences as simple as possible would be beneficial for reducing wasted votes.