Dr Christian Krekel

Dr Christian Krekel is Associate Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. He is Co-Director of the Wellbeing Programme at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), one of Europe’s leading economic research centres, as well as Research Affiliate at LSE’s Behavioural Research Lab and LSE’s Data Science Institute. He is also Research Associate at the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford.

Christian is an applied economist: his fields are behavioural economics, health, and wellbeing; behavioural welfare economics; policy appraisal and evaluation; and applied microeconomics. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the Paris School of Economics.

In his work, Christian looks at policies and interventions to improve people’s lives – specifically their behaviour, health, and (ultimately) their wellbeing. Recent examples include the evaluation of a nationwide mental health service in England (NHS Talking Therapies); estimating the causal effects of volunteering in the NHS (and Care) Volunteer Responders programmes on happiness, mental health, trust, and pro-sociality; nature exposure (including urban green spaces) and its impacts on wellbeing, mental health, and pro-environmental behaviour; or estimating the social value generated by the 2012 London Olympics or the London Marathon. His work aims at informing evidenced-based policy on how to improve these outcomes in a cost-effective way.

Christian has published in top-tier economics journals, such as The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Journal of Health Economics, as well as in leading interdisciplinary outlets, such as Social Science & Medicine and The BMJ. His work has featured extensively in the media, including The Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes, as well as on broadcast, including BBC News and BBC Radio 3.

Christian is a frequent advisor to international organisations such as The World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He also advises national governments such as the UK and New Zealand on how to use wellbeing data for policy appraisal and evaluation, as well as businesses and NGOs on how to demonstrate the social impact and value of their operations, on workplace quality, productivity, AI, and how to cultivate wellbeing at work, and on behavioural science more generally.

For his work, Christian has been awarded the Young Economist Award (FEEM Award) by the European Economic Association.

Expertise

Behavioural Economics, Health, and Wellbeing; Behavioural Welfare Economics, Policy Appraisal and Evaluation, Applied Microeconomics

Christian is Co-Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science and responsible for the academic leadership and management of this programme. He is also Co-Lead of its Wellbeing Specialism, a unique Master’s specialisation that offers students a rigorous training in the science of wellbeing and its application to policy. He teaches PB405 “Foundations in Behavioural Science”, LSE’s core behavioural science course.

In PB441 “Wellbeing for Policy”, Christian teaches students how to use wellbeing data for policy appraisal and evaluation. The assessment is a field simulation, in which students are given a real policy problem from UK Government and then work together as teams and present their solutions to actual policy-makers. Recent partners included the Department for Transport (DfT); the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC); and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). The course is accompanied by guest lectures featuring practitioners from across all sectors (governments, businesses, and NGOs).

Christian also teaches in LSE’s School of Public Policy, as supervisor of Capstone Projects in the MSc in Public Administration and as leader of Policy-in-Practice Workshops in the Executive MSc in Public Policy. He has taught executive students in the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science for many years, as well as in other courses in LSE’s executive education portfolio (EE917 “Creating High-Performing and Inclusive Organisations”).

In LSE’s Summer School, Christian teaches IR224 “Happiness and Policy”, the first comprehensive Summer School course on the science of wellbeing and its application to policy for advanced Bachelor’s and Master’s students. He also organises the LSE Wellbeing Seminar, the longest-running seminar dedicated to research in the economics of wellbeing worldwide.

As a member of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science’s Teaching Committee and LSE’s Academic Board and Graduate Studies Sub-Committee, Christian is actively shaping the development and delivery of teaching and its quality assurance in the department and the wider LSE. For his teaching, he has received several of LSE’s Excellence in Education Awards as well as Student Union Teaching Awards.

Christian’s current PhD students at the LSE are Sharon Raj, Hannah Chappell (part-time, Behavioural Insights Team), and Pinar Jenkins (part-time, Revolut). He also co-supervises Andreea Stoica at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). His former PhD students are Dr Nils Mallock (placed at King’s College London) and Dr Luc Schneider (placed at LSE).

Christian’s work has a profound impact on policy. He has co-developed the concept of the ‘Wellbeing-Year’ (or ‘WELLBY’ for short), a new measure of welfare in cost-benefit analyses which has officially been adopted by the UK and New Zealand Treasuries. It is now routinely used by governments for policy appraisal and evaluation, or by businesses and NGOs to demonstrate the social impact and value of their operations.

In A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making (Frijters and Krekel, 2021, Oxford University Press), Christian has co-developed new methods for cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis based on WELLBYs, which formed the basis for HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing, the official guidelines for policy appraisal in the UK. He is a named advisor on these guidelines.

Christian was the Principal Investigator of the Value-for-Money project at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), which applied these new methods to major policies identified jointly with UK Government partners. This has led to Value for Money: The New Cost-Benefit Analysis Targeting Wellbeing (Frayman et al., 2026, Cambridge University Press), which formed the basis for an updated version of HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing.

Christian is also the Principal Investigator and International Consortium Leader of ‘WELLMOD’, a project comprising 16 researchers from across the LSE, Paris School of Economics, University of Luxembourg, and Polish Academy of Sciences. It aims at building the first wellbeing policy simulation model, which will allow analysts across all sectors (governments, businesses, and NGOs) to appraise any policy or intervention in terms of how much wellbeing it generates per unit of cost. The project is supported by the European Commission’s EUROMOD team and financed by a competitive grant from the European Union.

More recently, Christian has co-developed another method – experiential valuation based on people’s momentary feelings of happiness in real-time – as an alternative way to measure welfare. Together with George MacKerron of Sussex University, he applied it for the first time to estimate the monetary value of time (VOT) in 42 daily activities. The method provides a uniform way to measure welfare, allowing analysts to calculate monetary values of time and place for all possible activities and locations, their interactions, and contexts in people’s lives, depending only on researchers’ and policy-makers’ interests and willingness to sample them.