Livvy Mitchell

Livvy joined Motu in January 2020, after completing a Master of Business in economics at Auckland University of Technology. For her thesis, Livvy conducted a policy evaluation of New Zealand’s home detention scheme using Statistics NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure. Throughout her bachelors and postgraduate study at AUT, she taught applied econometrics and microeconomics and was a research assistant for the School of Economics.

In 2017, she won the Sir Frank Holmes Prize for the best economics undergraduate in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2021, she won the 2021 Motu Doctoral Scholarship, awarded to Motu Research Analysts who leave Motu to do a highly rated PhD course.

At Motu, Livvy worked on and led a range of research projects across different topics.

She worked with Dr Lynn Riggs on two projects commissioned by the Climate Change Commission, using the IDI and LBD to model and characterise the distributional impacts of climate change mitigation policies. Lynn and Livvy also worked with the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment to explore differences in the characteristics of workers and firms across industries with varying emissions intensities.

Livvy then led a project with the HRMI team, commissioned by the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, where they developed a framework to empirically evaluate the New Zealand Government’s performance on the right to adequate housing and the right to health care and protection.

Finally, Livvy led an MSD-funded project, alongside Dr Izi Sin, exploring the prevalence of gendered parenting and the intergenerational transmission of gender stereotypes in Aotearoa.

In 2022, Livvy started her PhD in Economics at AUT. The working title of her thesis is “Essays within the economics of crime”, which will involve numerous econometric evaluations of criminal justice and crime-mitigation policies in Aotearoa. She hopes her research can be used to better inform policy makers about if their large financial investments in the justice system are achieving desirable outcomes.