Rate My Professor Stefanie Schurer

Professor Stefanie Schurer is Professor of Economics in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. She earned her PhD in Economics from the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics in 2008, an MSc in Economics from the University of York in 2004, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Potsdam in 2002. Her career trajectory includes Associate Professor (2017-2019) and Senior Lecturer (2014-2016) positions in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney, Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics and Finance at Victoria University of Wellington (2011-2013), and Research Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne (2008). An internationally recognised expert in the Economics of Human Development, her research examines lifecycle decision-making, policy evaluation, the development and stability of personality, preferences and health, inequalities in these traits, and public policy impacts on wellbeing, with a focus on First Nations children and early-life interventions such as welfare quarantining and lockdowns. She leads the Economics of Human Development research node at the Charles Perkins Centre. Key publications feature “Quantifying the human impact of Melbourne’s 111-day hard lockdown experiment on the adult population” (Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, with K. Atalay et al.), “The effect of quarantining welfare on school attendance in Indigenous communities” (Journal of Human Resources, 2023, with D. Cobb-Clark et al.), “The effect of lockdowns on mental health: evidence from a natural experiment” (The Lancet Public Health, 2022, with P. Butterworth et al.), and “Unintended consequences of welfare reform: evidence from birth outcomes of Aboriginal Australians” (Journal of Health Economics, 2022, with M. Doyle and S. Silburn). Her work has amassed over 4,800 citations on Google Scholar.