Matt is a Director at the Treasury and has been a member of the public service since 2009. His work has primarily focused on policy analysis on Australia’s tax and transfer system including revenue forecasting and costing and distributional analysis of tax and transfer policies using microsimulation modelling. Matt’s analysis has contributed to Budget updates and the 2021 Intergenerational Report. He has also been involved in major model development work on Treasury’s CAPITA and MARIA microsimulation models.

Matt’s research aims to use administrative data to build a dynamic microsimulation model of Australia’s tax and transfer system. This would deliver a durable tool for policy analysis that provides important insights on the sustainability and equity, both within and between generations, of personal tax and transfer policy settings. In doing so, it would build on the existing Australian toolkit of representative agent and cohort analysis to allow for the kinds of more granular and detailed distributional analysis to improve the debate around, and implementation of, public policy.

Supervisor: Professor Robert Breunig

Publications

• Bastian, B, Smith, M, Cheong, B, Pineda, V, Stevenson, M, Hutchison, O, & Kluth, S 2017, ‘Development of Treasury's new model of Australian retirement incomes and assets: MARIA (No. 2017-02)’. Treasury Working Paper, The Treasury, Canberra.
• Stevenson, M, Ledda, D, Pineda, V, Smith, M, & Kluth, S 2017, ‘CAPITA - Treasury's microsimulation model of personal income tax and transfers (No. 2017-05)’. Treasury Working Paper, The Treasury, Canberra.