Rate My Professor Carolyn Tran

Dr. Carolyn Tran serves as Senior Lecturer in the UNE Business School at the University of New England. She earned a Bachelor of Business Management from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, a Master of Arts in Development Economics from the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and a PhD in Applied Business Economics from the University of New England. Her research specializations encompass operational management, business analytics, local government, education economics, applied economics, development economics, efficiency and productivity analysis, applied econometrics, public policy analysis, competitiveness capacity, public administration, and socio-economics. She employs advanced methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis, Network DEA, meta-frontier DEA, and bootstrapping to examine efficiency in public sector organizations, including local governments and higher education institutions.

Dr. Tran's career includes previous roles as Senior Research Officer at the University of Sydney, Discipline Leader in Business and MBA Program Manager at the International College of Management Sydney from 2018 to 2020, Educational Consultant for a World Bank project in 2015, and Vice Rector of a Vietnamese college from 2005 to 2013. At UNE, she coordinates and teaches units including Introduction to Business Analytics (QM162), Business Statistics (QM161), Business Decision Making (QM265), Efficiency and Productivity Analysis (ECON377), and Digital Marketing Fundamentals (DM120). Her key publications include 'Administrative Intensity and Financial Sustainability: An Empirical Analysis of the Australian Public University System' (2025, International Journal of Public Administration), 'The Influence of Administrative Intensity on Efficiency: An Empirical Analysis of Australian Universities' (2023, Economic Papers), 'Administrative scale economies in public organisations: Evidence from Australian public universities' (2022, Studies in Higher Education), 'What Factors Generate Municipal Inefficiency? An Empirical Investigation of the Determinants of Input Excess in South Australian Local Government' (2021, Public Performance and Management Review), and 'Efficiency of the teaching-industry linkage in the Australian vocational education and training' (2021, Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training). Her work addresses administrative intensity, financial sustainability, scale economies, municipal performance, and policy impacts on public sector efficiency.