Kirsten Jensen

Valuing public expenditure -The wellbeing value to society of the New Zealand winter energy payment; Implications for public finance institutional design

Supervisors: Arthur Grimes and Dennis Wesselbaum (University of Otago)

Profile

Kirsten is an economist with more than 30 years public policy and public finance experience, and more than 20 years leadership experience at the New Zealand Treasury. She led Treasury budget and fiscal reporting teams delivering five New Zealand budgets. She was the lead advisor to the parliamentary select committee and led the cross agency team that amended the Public Finance Act.  She leads CBAx, the Treasury’s cost-benefit analysis tool. In Policy Quarterly “Valuing Impacts”, she shares the practical experiences from working with agencies to improve policy analysis and advice. She teaches cost-benefit analysis at the Government Economic Network and at Victoria University of Wellington. Kirsten is Director on the Board of the international Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.

Qualifications

Master of Economics – University of Copenhagen

Master of Public Policy (with distinction) – Victoria University of Wellington

Research Interests

Kirsten’s research interests include the value of public expenditure, public policy decision making and public finance institutional design.  She is researching the societal wellbeing consequences of public expenditure to inform strategic and long term public finance policy choices and trade-offs. She is interested in the societal value and wellbeing impacts of public spending, across transfer payments, health, education and other spending. She asks what difference public spending makes, i.e. “what is the value of public spending?” and whether it is worth it. To assess the effectiveness, efficiency and equity implications of a policy, she applies micro economic approaches including: econometric regression analysis, benefit-cost analysis and distributional incidence analysis.