Christian is Principal Economist and Practice Leader of LSE WAVE (Wellbeing Appraisal, Valuation & Evaluation), LSE Consulting’s Wellbeing Research and Policy Lab. LSE WAVE helps governments, businesses, and NGOs measure and value what conventional policy analysis often misses – such as health, social connection, good work, community, culture, and the environment – applying the ‘Wellbeing-Year’ (or ‘WELLBY’ for short) and the wider methods and tools that Christian and his team have developed.
LSE WAVE works across the full policy cycle: it appraises policies, programmes, and investments to help make better spending decisions, using cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis to compare their expected benefits and costs; it evaluates their real-world impacts afterwards, using randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-experiments to identify causal effects; and it places credible monetary values on impacts that markets miss, from social programmes to the ‘feelgood’ factor of major events, places, and cultural assets. Christian and his team also build bespoke simulation models that clients can run themselves, carry out commissioned research around a single client question, and help to develop the standards and methods on which this work rests.
LSE WAVE’s distinctive strength is authorship: its economists developed the WELLBY and helped to write HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing, the official guidance on how to use wellbeing data in policy analysis across UK Government. They pair this with rigorous conceptual and empirical analysis, to a publishable standard, and with the discipline of producing credible numbers rather than flattering ones – the kind of evidence that must withstand Treasury, audit, and public scrutiny.
Christian’s consulting clients span government and business, in the UK and internationally. In UK Government, they include the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS); the Department for Education (DfE); and the Department for Transport (DfT), alongside arms-length bodies such as Historic England; HM Land Registry; Ofcom; and Sport England. Internationally, they include New Zealand’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Government of Dubai. A recent client in the private sector is Reward Gateway | Edenred.
Alongside this, Christian designs and delivers workshops and trainings on wellbeing measurement, valuation, as well as appraisal and evaluation for policy-makers and practitioners. Participants have included the UK Cabinet Office; HM Treasury; the Bank of England; the Department for Business and Trade (DBT); the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA); the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC); the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP); and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), as well as DCMS; DfE; DfT; Arts Council England; Historic England; Ofcom; Sport England; and the Welsh Government.