Leslie Martin

Associate Professor Leslie Martin holds a position in the Department of Economics within the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. She obtained her PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in applied mathematics from MIT. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental economics, energy economics, industrial organization, and international development. As lead investigator of the Melbourne Environmental Data Analytics Lab (MEDAL), she utilizes frontier data analytics and partnerships with industry and government to design economic policies for decarbonizing energy, transportation, and manufacturing, as well as protecting forest and water systems. Martin has secured an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for work on the environmental impact of clustering manufacturing in special economic zones in rapidly industrializing countries. Prior grants enabled field experiments on consumer responses to electricity smart meter data in retail-competitive markets and analyses of distributional implications of road use charges using high-frequency data. She received an Early Career Researcher Grant from the University of Melbourne Faculty of Business and Economics in 2012.

Martin's publications appear in top journals, including 'Price Discrimination by Negotiation: A Field Experiment in Retail Electricity' (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, with David Byrne and Jia Sheen Nah), 'In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India' (American Economic Review, 2017, with Shanthi Nataraj and Ann Harrison), 'Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know: Informedness and the Impact of Information Programs' (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018, with David Byrne and Andrea La Nauze), 'Green Industrial Policy in Emerging Markets' (Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2017, with Ann Harrison and Shanthi Nataraj), and 'Learning versus Stealing: How Important are Market-Share Reallocations to India's Productivity Growth?' (The World Bank Economic Review, 2013, with Ann Harrison and Shanthi Nataraj). She serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Professional Email: leslie.martin@unimelb.edu.au