Richard Fabling

Richard is an empirical microeconomist specialising in business and labour economics, with a particular interest in understanding New Zealand workers, firms and jobs. He works in the Economics & Research team at the Productivity Commission, coming to that job after a decade as a self-employed independent researcher working for various public sector agencies. Richard has previously held senior research positions at Motu Research, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and the Ministry of Economic Development. He has been instrumental in the development of the Business Operations Survey, the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), and the labour and productivity datasets in the Integrated Data Infrastructure, and has co-authored over fifty papers using these data. Richard has a PhD in Applied Mathematics (Magnetohydrodynamics) from the University of Waikato, where his thesis entailed modelling solar flares.