Jakob Dirksen

Jakob is the Principal Researcher of the Perceptions of Inequality Research Programme at the LSE's International Inequalities Institute. He is also an Analysing and Challenging Inequalities Scholar at the LSE's Department of Social Policy and CASE/STICERD 2022, funded by the III, and is Senior Research and Policy Officer at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) within the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford.

In addition to perceptions of inequality and related topics, Jakob’s research is primarily concerned with questions of welfare economics, including empirical and methodological questions concerning the measurement of well-being, inequality, and poverty. He is also interested in questions around value pluralism and the use of well-being/inequality/poverty statistics for better policy-making. He regularly supports and advises governments and UN organisations in technical and policy processes around establishing and using multidimensional poverty and well-being metrics as official statistics and evidence-based policy tools. For his research, Jakob has been awarded STICERD, Hayek Programme, and LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact awards, as well a John Fell Fund award by Oxford University Press, and a Horowitz Foundation award. Previously, he worked, among other places, at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and the German Foreign Office.

Research topic:

The measurement of welfare, poverty, and inequality.

Research interests: the development and use of conceptually and normatively sound metrics for evidence-based policy-making. He seeks to better align well-being measurement with what people value and conducts research on the theoretical formulation, empirical estimation, and policy-application of welfare, inequality, and poverty measures.

Latest publications

• Nogales, R., Dirksen, J., Alkire, S. (2025) Advancing Inclusive Sustainable Development by Measuring Poverty and Wellbeing Better, G20 Policy Brief. [ Link ]
• Chelsie Cintron, Madolyn Rose Dauphinais, Xinyi Du, Alexa Tabackman, Andrew Lenart, Ashley Laliberte, Jakob Dirksen & Pranay Sinha (2025). Enriching tuberculosis research by measuring poverty better: a perspective. BMC Global Public Health 3, 17. [Link]

Supervisors: Dr Tania Burchardt, Professor Frank Cowell