Alistair Munro

Professor of Economics, GRIPS

モンローアリスター

Research

My research centres around experimental economics, behavioural and environmental and I often work on issues connected to development policy. Three thumbnails of ongoing projects are given below.
More comprehensive details on grants, publications and collaborators are available from the links below. Niigata art museum
Behavioural economics has transformed our picture of individual decision-making. Is the household also behavioural?

Behavioural households

Mean cooperation between spouses is significantly less than 100% in most intra-household experiments.

Ageing Japan and the Environment

Japan is at the forefront of ageing in the industrialized economics. Its population is dropping by several hundred thousand people each year. Preferences for environmental spending in Japan
Broadly speaking, a declining populations makes it easier to attain carbon emission targets. What are the other implications of Japan's ageing population for its environmental policy?

Lab-in-the-field

Epistemologically, the central idea is that a more useful understanding of the beliefs and preferences elements of individuals and groups can be obtained by conducting controlled interventions with non-students away from the typical campus laboratory.
experiment task

Learned helplessness

Now published in World Development. Working with a sample of smallholder farmers from rural Uganda and using established ideas on contingency from social psychology, we investigate experimentally whether performance in an unrelated task has spillover effects for effort in a new task.

Teaching

Niigata art museum
  • Advanced Microeconomics I
  • Environmental Economics (Masters)
  • Mathematics for Economic Analysis (Masters)

Previous Teaching

  • Advanced Microeconomics III - Behavioural and Experimental (PhD).
  • Public Economics (pg/ug)
  • Game theory (pg/ug)
  • Climate Change Economics (pg/ug)
  • Microeconomic theory (pg/ug)
  • Decision making (ug)
  • Industrial Economics (ug)
  • Methods (ug)

Phd Students

I have ex-students at the IMF, ADBI, working as university professors or researchers in Europe, Singapore, Asia and Africa and serving as civil servants in their home countries.

Past

Current students are doing projects on onlne gambling in Indonesia, the circular economy in Japan and household decision-making over debt in Thailand.

Present

I welcome students with an interest in applying experimental and behavioural economics to environmental issues. Almost all my students engage in primary data collection of some sort, a skill I see as essential for the social science researcher and one that offers limited immunity against replacement by AI.

Future

You should have your own ideas and I expect you to complete successfully our Advanced core in Macroeconomics, Microeconomics and Econometrics before we partner.

About Me

I'm a native of Coventry, UK, home of Ghost Town , the real Godiva and the British motor industry, as well as the disputed birthplace of the modern bicycle.

Bio

I was previously a Professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London and before that inaugural head of the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia.

Formerly

Contact