Sarah Dong is a Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy of the Australian National University and also a member of the ANU Indonesia Project. She obtained her PhD in economics from University of Western Ontario in 2014 and joined the ANU Crawford School afterwards. She is an applied micro-economist with research interests in labour market, women’s labour market outcomes, informal economy, tax compliance, and higher education.

Her current research questions include: how can we reconcile the increasing schooling and the stagnating labour force participation rate of women in many developing countries? How can we define the informal sector, whether we need to formalize this sector, and how can we formalize it? And relatedly how can we improve tax revenue collection given the size of the informal sector?

Her work has been accepted or published in academic journals, books and policy forums such as Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics, International Journal of Education Development, and Review of Development Economics. She has a special interest in Indonesia and is currently an editor for the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.