Research Bio

(& videos!)

Current Affiliations

I am a Professor of Economics at the Economics Department of the University of Warwick. I am Coordinator of the Experimental and Behavioural Economics Research Group (EBERG) at the Economics Department, a Fellow of CRETA, and one of the academic leads of the Behaviour, Brain & Society global research priority for Warwick, which oversees the inter-disciplinary DR@W group of behavioural and experimental researchers at the University of Warwick.

Outside Warwick, I am a member of the World Wellbeing Panel formerly based at the LSE and Barcelona and now based in Montreal, a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn and I am also affiliated with the Behavioural Data Science research programme at the Alan Turing Institute in London.

Between 2015 and 2020 I ran Theme 3 of the ESRC-funded CAGE centre, which focussed on finding better ways to understand and measure subjective wellbeing ("happiness") and related behavioural concepts. This included being part of the team that won a total of £5.5m in funding.

Research Fields

My main areas of interest are behavioural economics, experimental economics and economic theory. My early work was on learning and games, with applications to industrial organisation and finance, but have always included a mixture of theory and experimental methods. More recently I have been working at the borders with psychology and data science, attempting to understand how psychological traits, cognitive biases, mood, language, culture and beliefs affect behaviour and using a mixture of experimental methods and "Big Data".

Videos

Below are a selection of interviews and videos in which I talk about behavioural science, data science and subjective wellbeing ("happiness economics"). You can also hear me speak about measuring happiness in the past on The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 and why small talk matters on the Naked Scientist podcast (which appeared on BBC Radio 5). My work has been very widely covered in the media, including around 500 pieces in newspapers or websites, with some highlights being front page coverage in the Times and Guardian, editorials in the Economist and leading broadsheets, and dozens of interviews for national (and international) newspapers and on the radio.

Plenary Lecture 2023: Measuring National Wellbeing in the Past - Economic History Society

Do first impressions actually matter?How much do we judge people on the first impression they make, and why might the brain do this?

BBC Radio 4 - PM, When was Britain happiest?New research attempts to chart people's happiness over the last 200 years.

Former Affiliations

I started my academic life as an undergraduate at Fitzwilliam College in the University of Cambridge. I moved to Nuffield College at the University of Oxford where I gained my doctorate and at the same time worked as a college lecturer at several Oxford colleges such as Magdalen, St. Catherine's and St. Hugh's. My first full-time academic post was back at Cambridge, initially as AEA Technology Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, before becoming a Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Economics and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Applied Economics (which sadly no longer exists). I have also been a visiting professor at UCL and at the Centre for Experimental Social Science (CESS) in Oxford, and was a research associate at Nuffield College in Oxford from 2017-21.