Experts

Dr Christian Krekel
Principal Economist and Practice Leader

Dr Christian Krekel is Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE. He is Co-Director of the Wellbeing Programme at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and Principal Economist at WAVE.

Christian's expertise lies in showing whether policies, programmes, and investments genuinely improve people's lives, and whether they do so cost-effectively. He co-developed the 'Wellbeing-Year' (WELLBY), the method for valuing wellbeing now officially adopted by the UK and New Zealand Treasuries, and has applied it across a wide range of areas, including mental health, work and employment, green spaces and nature, energy infrastructure, natural disasters, major sporting events, and education.

Christian has published in top-tier economics journals as well as in leading inter­disciplinary outlets. His work has featured extensively in the media, including The Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, as well as on broadcast, including BBC News and BBC Radio 3. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Paris School of Economics.

Professor Lord Richard Layard
Principal Economist

Professor Lord Richard Layard is a British labour economist and founder-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science – where he is now Co-Director of the Wellbeing Programme.

His early career focused on how to reduce unemployment and inequality. Richard was Senior Research Officer for the famous Robbins Committee on Higher Education whose report led to the massive expansion of UK university education in the 1960s and 1970s.  He is also one of the first economists to work on happiness, and continues to find significant effects of relative income on happiness and to emphasise the importance of non-income variables on aggregate happiness. For the past 20 years, he has focused on how better mental health could improve our social and economic life, and was instrumental in the development of improving access to psychological therapies in the UK – which now treats over 700,000 people a year.

Richard has published multiple books over his career including Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (which was translated into 19 languages), alongside hundreds of articles in top-tier economics journals as well as in leading inter­disciplinary outlets. His work has featured widely in the media, including The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Economist as well as on broadcast media, including BBC News, Sky News, BBC’s The Today Programme and numerous other outlets and podcasts.

Andrew Clark
Senior Economist

Andrew Clark holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. He is a CNRS Full Research Professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and Visiting Professor in the Wellbeing Programme at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). He previously held posts at Dartmouth, Essex, CEPREMAP, DELTA, the OECD and the University of Orléans.

Andrew was one of the first researchers in Economics to use data on subjective well-being. His research has covered the role of comparisons (to others like you, to your partner etc.) in well-being, and the use of long-run panel data to model adaptation to life events (such as unemployment, marriage, and divorce). Recent work has used birth-cohort data to analyse the influence of family background and childhood events on adult outcomes (including adult subjective well-being), and considered the causes and consequences of economic insecurity. He is one of the authors of The Origins of Happiness (Princeton University Press).

Andrew has published extensively in economics and other social science journals, and is an ISI Highly-Cited Researcher. He is a frequent speaker at academic and policy events, and recently contributed to Round Tables organised by the United Nations, the Global Wellbeing Institute, Printemps de l'économie, the UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, HM Treasury, and the ISQOLS and IARIW-World Bank Group-UEB/VNU Conferences. He has acted as a consultant to the UK Department of Employment, the UN, the OECD, the European Commission, and the UK Low Pay Commission.

Sara MacLennan
Senior Economist

Sara MacLennan helps governments and public bodies put wellbeing at the centre of their spending decisions, and work out which investments genuinely deliver value for money. She is a Senior Research Fellow at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and a Senior Economist at WAVE.

Sara specialises in valuing wellbeing in policy appraisal. She authored HM Treasury's Supplementary Green Book Guidance on Wellbeing, the official UK guidance for building wellbeing into policy appraisal, in 2021, and its updated 2026 edition, and played a leading role in establishing HM Treasury's monetary value of wellbeing for use in cost-benefit analysis, working across government departments and with leading academics.

Her work spans the value for money of government investments across wellbeing, children, health, and the environment. Over more than twelve years in the Government Economic Service in the UK, and as Head of Evidence at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, she has helped departments build wellbeing into their policy analysis, business cases, and investments, drawing on a global network of wellbeing economists and academics.

Dr Maria Cotofan
Senior Economist

Dr Maria Cotofan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. She is a Research Affiliate at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), a Research Associate at the Wellbeing Research Centre (University of Oxford), and a Research Affiliate at IZA. Maria is a Senior Economist at WAVE.

Maria's research examines how public policies and life experiences, including sport and physical activity, volunteering, climate change, and labour market conditions, shape wellbeing, the extent of measured inequality, and socio-economic preferences more broadly. She also works on the determinants of political behaviour and of populism, and on understanding what motivates people in the workplace.

Her research has been published in leading economics and interdisciplinary journals and has been featured by The Guardian, Forbes, The Independent, and The BBC. Maria’s work is also closely linked to policy, contributing evidence and analysis to the Low Pay Commission, to various government departments, and to the APPG on Wellbeing Economics. And she works closely with the World Wellbeing Movement where she produces the annual UK Wellbeing Report which monitors the state of happiness across the nation. She holds a PhD in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Dr Kate Laffan
Senior Economist

Dr Kate Laffan is Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE, where teaches on the MSc in Behavioural Science and co-leads its Wellbeing Specialism, and Visiting Assistant Professor at UCD's Geary Institute for Public Policy. Kate is a Senior Economist at WAVE. She is a Senior Economist at WAVE.

Kate's expertise lies in understanding the bi-directional relationship between the environment and wellbeing, and in using that understanding to design interventions that promote sustainable lifestyles, better quality environments, and happier lives. She has applied this expertise across a wide range of areas, including green infrastructure, air pollution, meat consumption, and renewable energy, using field experiments, spatial analysis, and methods such as the Day Reconstruction Method to capture fine-grained behavioural and wellbeing data.

Kate has published in leading academic journals, including science, Nature Human Behaviour, or the Journal of Environmental Psychology. She holds a PhD in Social Policy from LSE.

Dr Ekaterina Oparina
Senior Economist

Dr Ekaterina Oparina measures how health and social interventions change lives, for whom, and at what cost. She is a Research Economist at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), a Research Affiliate at the Wellbeing Research Centre (University of Oxford), and a Senior Economist at WAVE.

Ekaterina brings causal methods to practical policy questions. She led the first nationwide causal evaluation of NHS Talking Therapies, England's psychological therapy service, and has developed a method for weighting wellbeing gains when a policy's benefits fall unevenly across a population. She works with charities and social enterprises — among them GoodGym, NHS Volunteer Responders and climateXchange — to build robust evidence of what their activities achieve. She advises government on wellbeing appraisal.

Her research appears in leading economics journals and in interdisciplinary outlets, and has been covered by the Financial Times, Vox and Alternatives Économiques. She writes for policy audiences, including for the World Happiness Report, and blogs for CEPR's VoxEU, IZA and LSE British Politics and Policy. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Surrey.

Dr David Frayman
Research Economist

Dr David Frayman is a Research Economist at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). His research spans health, wellbeing, education and employment, using applied economics and causal evaluation to understand the effects of social policies and investments and whether they deliver value for money.

David currently leads research projects examining the links between health and education, with a particular focus on mental health, special educational needs and child outcomes. He is also an author of the forthcoming Cambridge University Press book Value for Money: The New Cost-Benefit Analysis for Wellbeing, which sets out how wellbeing can be incorporated into cost-benefit analysis and public spending decisions.

David has published in economics and interdisciplinary journals, and works closely with policymakers across government. He has served as an advisor to the UK Government’s Independent Review into Mental Health Conditions, ADHD and Autism and has led workshops for government departments and public bodies on cost-benefit analysis. He holds a PhD from University College London.