Matt Nolan

New Zealand’s sexiest economist: The results are in!!

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Wow.  What a roller-coaster ride that was.  The lead changed hands countless times (as I wasn’t counting), but in the end our sexiest economist poll did have an outright winner.

It is my privilege to announce that the deserved winner of the 2014 New Zealand sexiest economist competition was Marie Marconnet!

Marie Marconnet – Castalia

Marie Marconnet – Castalia

With 273 votes from the 1,003 that were cast, Marie was the clear winner – beating out Özer Karagedikli on 158 votes and Geoff Cooper on 150 votes.  However, the traffic wasn’t all one way – early on Marie was in the lead, but then slid back to 3/4 position for the majority of the competition.  However, on Friday Marie made a sudden surge up the charts with votes piling in from around the world for the economist from Castalia.  As was stated on Twitter:

Assuming that sex is an acroymn for “social science and economics to the extreme”, I think Harry has summed up how we should feel about Marie’s work, and the work of all the contestants in this competition – a series of individuals helping to push on our knowledge of the trade-offs faced in society, so we can make more informed decisions.

I asked Marie for some comments about her work to celebrate her win.  She was in Senegal at the time and said:

We’re helping the Government implement Senegal’s renewable energy law, by evaluating energy scenarios, developing a methodology for setting RE tariffs, developing tender procedures, and advising on power purchase agreements. It’s pretty interesting!

Awesome – this is the sort of tough work around institutional and legal structures that will change an immeasurable number of lives.  As I’ve said in the past, I am no energy economist so the actual work is beyond my ability to sum up 😉

As a result, I’ll just repeat my profile from the poll.

Marie Marconnet, Castalia:  Marie was a Masters student at Victoria at the same time I was.  However, when I was floating around with unimportant hypotheses she was looking at hard data, and trying to analyse real world questions regarding the Pacific Islands.  Over the last seven years she has been employed at Castalia extending and broadening her analysis of developing nations.  When nominating her someone admitted that they’d never met an economist who could articulate and argue real world concepts as clearly as Marie.

Final notes

I’d like to thank all the people who nominated, voted, and who linked to the competition through Twitter, Facebook, and NBR.  I’d also like to give a shout out to all of our contestants for being good natured about this, as well as doing some pretty awesome work.

Economics and its practitioners can be pretty awesome, and this is something we should be allowed to celebrate.  So why not celebrate it in this little corner of the internet, found in our little corner of the world 😉

Also, don’t let me forget that I owe Marie a trophy, and that I also owe Darren a trophy from last year!