About me

I am glad you are visiting my site. Welcome! 

I am a Human Development Economist with a strong interest in understanding how early-life interventions affect the trajectories of children and youth over the lifecycle.

My earlier work almost exclusively focused on the causes and consequences of non-cognitive skills (alongside outcomes such as mental health and health behaviours, and economic preferences), their socioeconomic and gender gradients and their dynamics over the lifecycle. In this work I mainly used cohort and longitudinal survey data, some of which I collected myself. In this work I developed theory and empirical methods to deal with measurement and endogeneity problems.

This work was followed by various evaluations of the impact of Australian government interventions on vulnerable children's outcomes using quasi-experimental methods and novel linked administrative data. In what developed into large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations across universities and with government agencies, we have produced important insights on the impact of hard government interventions (e.g. alcohol and welfare spending restrictions, lockdowns, compulsory schooling, bail denial, forced separation) and softer alternatives (e.g. family coaching, unconditional cash transfers, additional care and parental education at birth). We also used these linked administrative data sources to better understand the drivers of youth adversity, especially among First Nations populations.

My most recent research explores the role and effectiveness of government paternalism in protecting children and young people from the consequences of their own or their parents' myopic or harmful decisions. In this new work I started going back to theoretical basics — linking insights from behavioural economics with standard welfare and health economics — to better understand. Concretely, I am interested in three questions:

1. why hard government interventions that restrict individual choice might fail to reach their intended goals, especially among youth;

2. whether softer options that protect choice or empower children and their families might be more effective; and

3. why people are not seeking the care and support they might need.

I am collaborating with researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Bergen to design new surveys to elicit people's demand for both mental health care and hard and soft paternalistic interventions (points 1–3 above). 

Reach out if you want to learn more or collaborate: stefanie.schurer [at] sydney.edu.au