Professor Stefanie Schurer

Stefanie Schurer is a Professor of Economics in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. She is an internationally recognised expert in the field of the Economics of Human Development. She has produced some of the first insights on the stability and determinants of non-cognitive skills over the life course. Her current research program focuses on the impact of public policy on human development. She is a chief investigator on several linked administrative data projects in Australia. She uses such big data to study the consequences of Australia’s key family, welfare, and medical policies for (Indigenous) children. Professor Schurer has been deeply engaged with Indigenous researchers and research on Indigenous children in the past years. She leads the NHMRC-funded Against the Odds: Indigenous Youth Wellbeing project, has led multiple evaluations on the impact of the Northern Territory’s controversial income management and alcohol restriction policies, is a co-investigator on several evaluations of the NSW child protection system where Indigenous children are heavily over-represented, is the incoming secretary and board member of the international Association for Economic Research of Indigenous Peoples, and is a member of the Charles Perkins Centre’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Steering Committee. Since 2020, she is also a member of the National Economic Panel of the Economic Society of Australia.

The recipient of numerous awards, Professor Schurer was trained at Germany’s progressive Ruhr Graduate School in Economics and the University of York. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and Menzies School of Health Research since 2015, is an IZA Research Fellow and an affiliate of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Network. She holds editorial duties at the European Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. She is the co-founder of the multi-institutional virtual Australian Health & Human Capital Economics Seminar series, an Australian-wide workshop series bringing international speakers to Australia.