Christian’s research sits at the intersection of economics, psychological and behavioural science, and public policy. His primary fields are behavioural economics, health, and wellbeing; his secondary fields are behavioural welfare economics, policy appraisal and evaluation, and applied microeconomics. Across all of his work, he is deeply committed to interdisciplinary research that bridges these fields.
At its core, Christian’s research agenda develops and applies new welfare measures and methods for policy analysis to help policy-makers across all sectors (governments, businesses, and NGOs) make better resource allocation decisions and focus on what really matters to people: their health, social relationships and belonging to their local community, trust, decent work and pay, their built and natural environment, and so on. This agenda has five linked objectives:
- To develop new welfare measures that go beyond GDP.
- To generate the evidence base on their causal determinants and consequences.
- To develop new methods for policy appraisal and evaluation based on them.
- To train today’s and tomorrow’s policy-makers and decision-makers in using these measures and methods.
- To promote them across all sectors through knowledge exchange, impact, and public science.
His particular focus is subjective wellbeing (or ‘wellbeing’ for short), which he proposes as a new, more holistic measure that captures welfare more accurately than traditional measures such as willingness to pay or market prices.
Christian’s empirical work looks at policies and interventions to improve people’s lives – specifically their behaviour, health, and (ultimately) their wellbeing, mostly in their local communities. He uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate causal effects – exploiting natural experiments or specific design features of policies and programmes – as well as experimental methods (RCTs), in areas such as mental health, volunteering and pro-social behaviour, the value of the built and natural environment, and public goods and services more generally. Besides causal identification, he pays close attention to how findings generalise to the wider population.
Importantly, Christian then translates these causal effects on people’s wellbeing into monetary equivalents, to conduct social welfare analyses that assess the value-for-money of different policy options, or to provide social values for use in policy. Whenever feasible, he uses innovative welfare measures and appraisal methods, such as the ‘Wellbeing-Year’ (or ‘WELLBY’ for short), as well as cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses based on it, which he co-developed and which have officially been adopted by the UK and New Zealand Treasuries.