Prof. Abigail Payne, Ph.D.

University Tuition, Charitable Giving and Poverty Reduction

During her visit to CES, Abigail Payne will be working on multiple projects. First, she aims to understand the impact of tuition fees on university attendance and choice of major, as well as the effect of income contingent student loans on earnings, career choices, and family decisions. She will focus on the Australian system, a highly regulated one in terms of tuition fees and domestic placements. Ms. Payne hopes to shed light on challenging research questions through her analysis of 30 years of data on university participation and student debt accumulation.

Second, she will explore the relationship between tax-receipted charitable giving and family dynamics. Not much is known about how tax incentives influence giving over a person's lifetime. Building upon the work of Andreoni, Brown, and Rischall (2003) on charitable giving by married couples, Ms. Payne plans to use new data to investigate not only the dynamics of giving within couples but also the potential influence of one person on another's giving.

Third, Abigail Payne is developing better data to understand the connection between regional or community poverty rates and the factors that contribute to or hinder poverty reduction. She is interested in exploring the dynamics of the transition from youth to young adulthood and the role of public structures such as schools and youth and family services in facilitating successful transitions.

Ms. Payne is a public economist focused on education, philanthropy, and the role of public and non-profit services for creating opportunities and addressing challenges. She has a strong track record of accessing administrative and proprietary data and establishing secure shared environments for their use. Her research has encompassed data from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Abigail Payne served as the Director of the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research at the University of Melbourne for two terms (2016-2024). She is now looking forward to returning to a primarily research-focused position at the Melbourne Institute. Prior to her time at the University of Melbourne, she was a Professor of Economics at McMaster University. Ms. Payne holds a PhD from Princeton University, a J.D. (law) from Cornell University and a BA from Denison University. She has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, and many other journals. She is a CESifo Research Network Fellow and a member of the CESifo Economics of Education Network and currently serves as the chairwoman of the ifo Institute's Scientific Advisory Council.