My name is Eamon McGinn. I live in Sydney, Australia.
I'm a PhD applied economist, former Deloitte partner and now work at Rennie Advisory. I advise government and industry on infrastructure, climate resilience and regional economic modelling. I combine fast, data-lean simulation tools with peer-reviewed econometrics to turn evidence into clear policy choices.
I'm an economist who builds micro-economic models covering simulation, cost-benefit analysis, econometrics and forecasting to answer policy and business questions. Most of my work sits in transport, energy, resources and agriculture, and increasingly tackles decarbonisation, climate resilience and the circular economy. I translate results into clear, published advice that helps decision-makers weigh costs, benefits and trade-offs.
I joined Deloitte Access Economics in 2010 and stayed for 15 years, finishing as a Partner in May 2025. As Partner (2021 - 2025), I led a 12-person team and oversaw more than 100 projects. I am now an Executive Director at Rennie Advisory.
Earlier in my career I was an economist with the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES).
Here are some examples of the type of work I've done in recent years:
I completed a PhD in Economics at University of Technology Sydney in 2021.
I held the Ross Milbourne Research Scholarship in Economics. My research applied econometrics to voter and politician behaviour. I tutored public economics, global economy and environmental economics.
Full thesis (PDF) | Google Scholar profile
I have a Bachelor of Commerce with Honours in Economics from The University of Sydney. I received the Jack Tilburn Honours Scholarship and wrote my thesis on co-operation in repeated games. I tutored introductory microeconomics, introductory macroeconomics and political economy.
I also hold a Master of Economics from the University of New South Wales, focusing on microeconomics and econometrics. A term paper from this degree was published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports in 2013.
On the side, I completed a Graduate Diploma of Brewing at Federation University.
Journal Articles
In Australia, where voting is compulsory, around 5 per cent of votes are informal, not counting toward the outcome. Between 2004 and 2016, 32 per cent of electorates reported more informal votes than votes in the margin between the winner and runner-up. Using exogenous changes in electorate boundaries, we test two hypotheses from the literature. We find the pivotal voter theory unsupported, except that better-educated voters respond to the margin more strategically. However, we do find that more candidates cause more informal votes. This choice-overload effect is observed regardless of voters' education, indicating the role of time and effort cost rather than cognitive difficulty.
Major rail infrastructure projects are city-shaping in nature and have the potential to generateeconomic benefits beyond conventional transport benefits. These benefits include improved amenity of public realm in railway station precincts, arising from place-making and precinct activation initiatives as part of the project scope. However, there is a lack of supporting parameter values based on local evidence in Australia, which compromises the ability to include such benefits in economic appraisals.
This research paper presents a stated preference survey undertaken in Greater Sydney. The survey was designed to estimate customers' willingness to pay (WTP) for improved amenity in railway station precincts. The research findings provide economic parameter values aligned with the Pedestrian Environment Review System (PERS) developed by Transport for London and calibrated with local evidence in Greater Sydney. The outputs can be applied to estimate the precinct amenity benefits in the cost benefit analysis of transport or place-making initiatives.
The team batting second in a day-night cricket match faces different playing conditions to the team batting first. This paper quantifies the effect on the runscoring ability of the team batting second by using the difference in differences estimator. This approach indicates that batting during the evening reduces the expected number of runs scored per over by 0.2. The effect explains around 12% of the total margin of loss for teams in the treatment group who lose the match. It is also found that batting during the evening increases the expected number of wickets lost at any given point in the innings.
Working Papers
This paper develops the first formal synthesis of three classical economists' theories of stagnation by combining Malthus's population dynamics, Ricardo's land degradation and capital accumulation, and Jevons's efficiency paradox. Calibrated to England in 1700–1850, the unified Malthus-Ricardo-Jevons (MRJ) model closely matches historical dynamics of population, GDP, coal consumption, capital and land, capturing that dramatic technological transformation coincided with modest living standards improvement. Counterfactual experiments reveal that demographic and resource constraints dominate potential economic growth. Isolated technology acceleration, TFP growth, and efficiency improvements all trigger system collapse without demographic transition. Most strikingly, implementing every improvement except demographic transition yields barely any per capita gains as population absorbs all productivity growth. The framework validates classical economists as sophisticated theorists of economic constraint while illuminating why successful industrialisation proved historically exceptional.
The relationship between the density of alcohol outlets and crime rates is an extensively researched question with immediate policy implications. Standard approaches almost universally show that alcohol availability leads to an increase in most crimes. This is the first study that addresses the endogeneity of the relationship between crime and alcohol by using a unique, historical shock to liquor license availability in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia where around 10% of alcohol outlets were closed in the early 20th Century. We show that a higher density of liquor premises substantially increases non-domestic violence-related assaults, but has no effect on domestic violence-related assaults, sexual assaults or assaults on police. Policymakers must seek other ways of reducing domestic violence and alcohol harm minimisation requires location specific policy.
Public communications have been the center of studies on the effect of forward guidance. The Fed's public communications are based on private discussions within FOMC. This paper analyses private information revealed in FOMC meeting transcripts. Combining textual analysis and time series techniques, our study finds: (1) private information has an information advantage in predicting future policy rate changes, conditional on public information and economic variables; and (2) public information does not overshadow the predictive power of economic variables. These findings imply that the Fed can be more assertive and transparent in its communication to anchor market expectations on future policy.
American elections almost always use a First Past the Post (FPTP) system for electing candidates. Moving to a ranked choice/instant run-off vote (IRV) approach has been suggested by a number of advocacy groups to improve the electoral system. Currently, IRV is only used in a small number of municipal elections in the United States but this number has grown significantly over the last ten years. There are mixed findings in the literature on the benefits of IRV for voters and politicians, this makes informed debate around its adoption challenging. Analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro Area indicates that the introduction of IRV caused a 9.6 percentage point increase in turnout for Mayoral elections, on average. The effect on turnout is larger for precincts that have higher poverty rates. Text based sentiment analysis on mayoral debates in a broader set of cities across the U.S. indicates that the introduction of IRV improved the civility of debates with candidates substituting negative or neutral words for positive words.
Polarization of politicians and the electorate is endemic in the current popular discussion of politics. However, there is a mix of empirical findings on whether polarization is actually occurring and no consensus on its cause. In this paper I adapt a simple model of political behavior to be applicable to a recent politically charged moment in Australia -- a national vote on same sex marriage. I apply a text as data approach to analyse the debate in parliament that followed the vote. Measuring the degree of support or opposition to SSM in speeches over time indicates that politicians who were ideologically opposed to SSM strengthened their opposition regardless of how their electorate voted while supporters of SSM did not change their behavior. This result indicates that polarization did occur and that the polarizing behavior is consistent with differences in political ideology being associated with differences in prior beliefs about the state of the world. In particular, although the national vote was in favor of SSM, the results seem to have provided information to Opposers of SSM that their position was more widely supported than previously believed, leading them to increase the strength of their opposition to SSM.
Recipes