Academy Fellow

Guay Lim is a Professorial Fellow (Honorary) at the University of Melbourne. She is an applied macroeconomist and her primary research interest lies in the application of macroeconomic forecasting and policy models to understand issues about inclusive growth, the labour share of national income and business cycle stabilisation. She is especially interested in asymmetric and time-varying behaviour (e.g., in the relationship between unemployment and growth embodied in Okun’s Law and in the role of monetary and fiscal policy rules under asymmetric and crisis situations). 

Her research on inclusive growth and the labour share explores the role of market power and technology, especially for small open economies. Most recently, she has investigated the effects of productivity and investment shocks and how the mix of physical and human capital investment affects the capital/labour ratio – a crucial element to understanding the effect of technology on skills and income inequality. She has also extended her modelling work to determine the (latent) natural rate of interest under conditions of full employment.   

Guay is also interested in indicators of economic activity and her paper entitled “The Australian Economy in 2020–21: The COVID‐19 Pandemic and Prospects for Economic Recovery”, had an Altmetric Score of 47 (i.e., in the top 5% of all research outputs scored to gauge recognition beyond academia).

Beyond Okun’s Law: Output Growth and Labor Market Flows (with Dixon, R., and J.Van Ours, Empirical Economics (2021) , vol. 60(3), pages 1387-1409, March  

Unconventional Monetary and Fiscal Policies in Interconnected Economies: Do Policy Rules Matter? (with McNelis PD) Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2018), 93, 346-363. 

Interest Rates, Local Housing Markets and House Price Over-reactions (with Tsiaplias, S.) Economic Record (2018), 95 (S1), 33-48, June [Awarded the Best paper prize]  

Growth and Income Inequality: Threshold Effects of Trade and Financial Openness, (with McNelis,P.D.) Economic Modelling (2016) vol 58, 403-412 

Alternative Government Spending Rules: Effects on Income Inequality and Welfare, (with McNelis, P.D.) Macroeconomic Dynamics (2013), 17, 1496-1518