New Zealand Activity Index (NZAC)
Nowcasting · Principal component analysis · Statistical inference
A real-time economic monitoring index developed to address the critical lack of timely economic data during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when standard indicators like GDP suffered from significant reporting lags. The index is derived by extracting a latent signal of economic activity from eight diverse monthly indicators, including consumer spending, electricity demand, and traffic volumes. Originally a Treasury-led tool for monitoring real-time economic activity, the index is now an established monthly indicator published by Statistics New Zealand.
View the indicator at Stats NZ and read the technical docs at New Zealand Treasury.
Infrastructure Project Classification
Natural language processing · Large language models · Retrieval-augmented generation
Delivered an LLM-based pipeline for the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission to classify thousands of infrastructure projects from unstructured text descriptions. The model was benchmarked against human experts, achieving >90% accuracy across a granular taxonomy of more than 100 separate infrastructure categories. The system forms a core data dimension of the National Infrastructure Pipeline — the Commission’s primary data product — enabling significantly more granular insights and downstream modelling from the dataset.
View the National Infrastructure Pipeline and infrastructure workforce modelling on the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission's insights platform (sign-up required).
Public Sector Discount Rates
Applied economics · Optimisation and decision theory · Intertemporal choice
An analysis of alternative economic frameworks for setting public sector discount rates produced for the New Zealand Treasury. This work helped shift the national policy debate, contributing to a gradual reduction in the central discount rate from 7% in 2016 to 2% in 2026. This downward adjustment significantly increases the present value of long-term benefits, effectively upweighting the interests of future generations in decisions we make now — such as infrastructure and climate investment decisions. The research was published in the Australian Economic Review (2018) and as a Treasury Working Paper (2017).
Read about the analysis in the Australian Economic Review and from the New Zealand Treasury.
Evolutionary Dynamics of Crime and Law Enforcement
Evolutionary game theory · Dynamical systems · Optimal control
A mathematical framework to capture the interaction between crime and law enforcement in large populations. The research identifies critical bifurcations (tipping points) in policy, demonstrating how slowly weakening enforcement can lead to a sudden, self-reinforcing collapse of social norms and a discontinuous spike in crime which can't easily be reversed. Published on arXiv.
Read the full paper on arXiv.
Modelling Cognitive Processes in Risky Decision-making
Eye-tracking · Gaussian mixture models · Poisson regression · Behavioral economics
A novel statistical framework to decode human decision-making using high-frequency eye-tracking data. This involved engineering a 3D Gaussian clustering model to classify 'fixations' — brief instants where a subject's eyes pause on information — and used Poisson regression to model transitions between them. The research provided early empirical evidence against the 'Priority Heuristic' and established the technical methodology used in a 2016 Journal of Behavioral Decision Making publication.
Read the final paper in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
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