People

Nava Ashraf

Nava Ashraf Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE, and Research Director of the Marshall Institute of Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship.

Tim Besley

Sir Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics of Political Science and W Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE, and Director of STICERD. He is also a member of the National Infrastructure Commission. His research interests are in public policy and political economy. He is a past President of the European Economic Association, International Economic Association and the Econometric Society and is President of the Royal Economic Society.

Bryan Cheang

Bryan Cheang is currently a postdoctoral fellow at STICERD. He was previously the Assistant Director and Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King's College London where he received his PhD in Political Economy. His current research interests are in comparative political economy, the implications of complexity and bounded rationality on Confucian political theory and governance in East Asia. He is the author of Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State: Hong Kong and Singapore's Post-War Development and Institutions and Economic Development.

Adam Oliver

Adam Oliver is a behavioural economist at the LSE. He is Editor in Chief of the journals, 'Behavioural Public Policy' and 'Health Economics, Policy and Law', and Chair of the International Behavioural Public Policy Association. His recent books include 'The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy' (Cambridge, 2017) and 'Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy' (Cambridge, 2019). He is currently working on the third book in this trilogy, 'A Political Economy of Behavioural Public Policy'.

Florian Artinger

Florian Artinger is co-founder and managing partner of Simply Rational - The Decision Institute, a professor of Business Administration at Berlin International University of Applied Sciences, and associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute and has been working as a researcher at the University of Warwick, the University of Chicago, and the University of Oxford. Florian's work integrates teaching, research, and consulting on decision-making, management, and machine learning. As a co-founder and managing partner of Simply Rational, Florian supports organization to measurably improve their decision processes.

Miguel Ballester

Miguel Ballester is a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He studies individual decision-making with a special interest on understanding the relevant behavioral traits guiding individual decisions and their variability, psychological foundations or welfare implications. He is also the Lord Thomson of Fleet Fellow at Balliol College, where he is a Tutor in Economics.

Walter Beckert

Walter Beckert is an Associate Professor of Economics at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He received his PhD in economics at UC Berkeley, under the supervision of Daniel McFadden. He does research in theoretical and applied microeconometrics, predominantly in empirical industrial organisation where demand analysis plays an integral role.

Jens Beckert

Jens Beckert is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He was recently a Theodor Heuß Professor at the New School in New York and a Fellow at the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris. In 2018 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his work reinvigorating the social sciences with an interdisciplinary perspective, especially at the intersection of sociology and economics. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, sociology of inheritance, organization theory, and social theory. His recently published books include "Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics" (Harvard University Press, 2016) and, "Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited with Richard Bronk.

Amar Bhidé

Amar Bhidé, the Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University was previously the Lawrence Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. He is completing a book on Knightian Uncertainty (which builds on more than thirty years of work on innovation and entrepreneurship) as he continues studying productive knowledge and transformational medical innovations. He is a founding member of the Center on Capitalism and Society, life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and non-executive director of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.

Richard Bronk

Richard Bronk is author of The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and co-editor with Jens Beckert of Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Richard worked for seventeen years in finance and the Bank of England before teaching political economy at the European Institute, LSE, where he was a visiting senior fellow until July 2020. His research focuses on radical uncertainty; the role of imagination, fiction, and language in economics; the dangers of analytical monocultures; and the relationship between uncertainty and populism.

Nancy Cartwright

Nancy Cartwright FBA FAcSS is a methodologist/philosopher of the natural and human sciences, focusing on the social and economic sciences, with special attention to causation, evidence and modelling. Her recent work is on scientific evidence, objectivity and how to put scientific knowledge to work. She is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego, having worked previously at Stanford University and the London School of Economics. Her latest books are Nature, the Artful Modeler and Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research with Eileen Munro, Jeremy Hardie and Eleonora Montuschi.

Jean-Paul Carvalho

Jean-Paul Carvalho is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College. His work on Political Economy and Social Dynamics combines game-theoretic models of population dynamics with historical analysis. He has contributed to a number of emerging fields, including the economics of identity, culture, and religion, through advances in modeling social norms, cultural evolution of preferences and belief systems, and the formation of groups and networks. He is co-editor of the volume Advances in the Economics of Religion (Palgrave 2019), and currently serves as board member of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC), board member and faculty fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), core associate of the Network for Economic Research on Identity, Norms and Narratives (ERINN), associate of Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD), and editorial advisory board member for the Oxford University Press book series on Philosophy, Politics & Economics.

Nick Chater

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He works on the cognitive and social foundations of rationality and language. He has published more than 250 papers, co-authored or edited more than a dozen books, has won four national awards for psychological research. He has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. He co-founded the research consultancy Decision Technology, and is a member of the UK's Committee on Climate Change.

Paul Collier

Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and a Director of the International Growth Centre, and the ESRC research network, Social Macroeconomics. His research covers the transformation from poverty to prosperity; state fragility; the implications of group psychology for development; migration and refugees; urbanization in poor countries and the crisis in modern capitalism, which is the subject of his book, The Future of Capitalism. Paul’s most recent book, Greed is Dead with John Kay was published in July 2020. Sir Paul received a knighthood in 2014 for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa and has been listed as one of the hundred most influential public thinkers.

Helen Elizabeth Davis

Helen Elizabeth Davis is a Research Associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She is a member of the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard and the Muthukrishna Lab at LSE. Her research focuses on the role cultural institutions play in shaping human cognition, as well as how cultural and environmental transitions contribute to human capital inequality. In 2018, she co-founded One Pencil Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which works to bridge scientific research and ethnography with development policy.

Alessandra Fogli

Alessandra Fogli is monetary advisor and assistant director in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Her research explores how an individual's social context, including family, neighborhood, school, as well as society at large, affects economic behavior and in turn aggregate economic outcomes. Fogli's research has been published in journals such as Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal, the Journal of Monetary Economics. Fogli earned her bachelor's degree summa cum laude in economics from Università Bocconi, and a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, since 2020 at the University of Potsdam. He is former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences and Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Basel and the Open University of the Netherlands, and is Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia.

Carla Groom

Dr Carla Groom is Deputy Director and Head of Behavioural Science at the Department for Work & Pensions. After studying psychology at Cambridge University, she completed a PhD in social psychology at Northwestern University and a post-doc at the University of Texas at Austin. During this time she published more than a dozen papers, one of which received the Society of Personality and Social Psychology Wegner award for Theoretical Innovation. Using her experience in Government, industry and academia, particularly her experience of working on automatic enrolment into workplace pensions, she has pioneered a form of behavioural practice that operates early in the design of policies and processes. Instead of applying and testing academic psychological research, the focus is on understanding better the context and complexity of human behaviours in the real world.

Joseph Henrich

Joe Henrich is a Professor at the Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Before moving to Harvard, he was a Professor of Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia for nearly a decade, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution. In 2013-14, Joe held the Peter and Charlotte Schoenenfeld Faculty Fellowship at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species' genetic evolution. He has conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Peru, Chile and the South Pacific, as well as having spearheaded several large comparative projects. In 2016, he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton) and in 2020, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous (FSG).

Sam Johnson

Sam Johnson works at the intersection of experimental cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick and Visiting Fellow in Marketing, Business, and Society at the University of Bath. His research focuses on cognitive tools and strategies people use to make sense of the world, focusing in particular on how people manage to make adaptive decisions despite sharp cognitive limits. He applies this perspective to investigate topics including choice under uncertainty, moral judgment and decision-making, and behavioral political economy.

John Kay

Sir John Kay is one of Britain's leading economists. His work is centred on the relationships between economics, finance and business. His career has spanned academic work and think tanks, business schools, company directorships, consultancies and investment companies. John has been a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford since 1970 and has held chairs at London Business School, the University of Oxford, and the LSE. He is the author of many books and articles - most recently Radical Uncertainty, jointly written with Mervyn King, and reed is Dead, co-authored with Paul Collier, published earlier this year.

Mervyn King

Mervyn King (Lord King of Lothbury, KG, GBE, FBA) served as Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to June 2013. He is the Alan Greenspan Professor of Economics and Professor of Law at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. In 2016 he published The End of Alchemy. His new book (with John Kay) Radical Uncertainty was published in March 2020. From October 1984 he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he founded the Financial Markets Group. He is Chair of the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Alan Kirman

Alan Kirman's first degree is from Oxford University and his PhD in economics from Princeton. He has been Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Warwick and at the European University Institute in Florence and has a PhD honoris causa from the Jaime 1 university in Castellon Spain. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the European Economics Association, has been member of the IAS Princeton. He was awarded the Humboldt Prize, and is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. He is panel chair for the 2020 Advanced Grant programme of the ERC in SHS. He is Honorary Editor of JEBO, and Associate Editor of several other journals. He has published more than 160 articles in international journals and is the author of three books including Complex Economics: from Individual to Collective Rationality and editor of 15 others.

David Laibson

David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics and Faculty Dean of Lowell House. He leads Harvard's Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative. Laibson is a member of the NBER, where he co-directs a National Institute of Aging Roybal Center. Laibson serves on Harvard's Pension Investment Committee, the Philadelphia Fed's Consumer Finance Institute, and the Board of the Russell Sage Foundation, where he chairs the Finance Committee. Laibson has served as Chair of Harvard's Economics Department and as a member of the Academic Research Council of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has twice received the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. Laibson graduated from Harvard (AB), the LSE (MSc), and MIT (PhD).

Matthew Levy

Graham Loomes

Graham previously held posts at the Universities of Newcastle, York and East Anglia and has been at Warwick since 2009. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and, currently, a co-investigator in the ESRC's Network for Integrated Behavioural Science. His research incorporates psychological insights into the analysis of people's preferences, particularly as they relate to decision making in the face of risk and uncertainty. This involves using experimental methods to test, develop and refine theory; and conducting surveys to address practical policy issues such as the valuation of life, health and safety.

Hugo Mercier

Hugo Mercier is a cognitive scientist working at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. He studies human reasoning and communication, as well as cultural evolution. He is the co-author, with Dan Sperber, of The Enigma of Reason, and the author of Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who we Trust and What we Believe.

Andrea Migliano

Andrea Bamberg Migliano is a Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Zurich. She works on comparative behaviour of hunter-gatherer populations, with ongoing fieldwork in the Philippines and Congo. She uses behavioural ecology, network analyses and experimental psychology to understand how diversity in the hunter-gatherers foraging niche has shaped human specific adaptations such as complex sociality, cumulative culture and pro-sociality. Professor Migliano received her PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2007. Following her PhD, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge, followed by an Associate Professorship at University College London. Since moving to Zurich in 2018, Professor Migliano has started the Hunter-Gatherers Evolutionary Ecology Group expanding the comparative fieldwork approach to Indonesia and the Amazon.

Mary Morgan

Michael Muthukrishna

Michael Muthukrishna is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology and affiliate of the STICERD Development Economics group at the LSE. He is also the Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on how genetic and cultural evolution shape our psychology and societies. He uses formal models, experiments, and data science techniques to investigate a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, and the navigation of cross-cultural differences.

Nathan Nunn

Nathan Nunn is Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. One stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the historical and dynamic process of economic development. In particular, he has studied the factors that shape differences in the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. Another stream of his research examines economic development in a contemporary context. He is particularly interested in the importance of the local context (e.g., social structures, traditions, and cultures) for the effectiveness development policy and in understanding how policy can be optimally designed given the local environment.

Jonathan de Quidt

Jonathan de Quidt is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University. He earned his PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics. He is also a Research Fellow in the CESifo Network, and an associate of CAGE and ThReD. His work uses economic theory and experiments to explore questions in behavioral and development economics, as well as research methodology.

Daniel Reck

Daniel Reck is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, having previously been at the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the LSE in 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley. Daniel conducts research on behavioral welfare economics and the application of behavioral economics to public policy questions. He is particularly interested in how empirical observation and normative judgment jointly shape optimal policymaking. He also researches tax evasion.

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College and a Visiting Professor at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. He has spent forty years thinking and writing about the interaction between economics and morality. He has written several books that address aspects of this interaction, including The Battle for Human Nature, The Costs of Living, The Paradox of Choice, Practical Wisdom, and most recently, Why We Work. Schwartz has spoken four times at the TED conference, and his TED talks have been viewed by more than 25 million people.

Robert Sugden

Bob Sugden is Professor of Economics at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. His research uses a combination of theoretical, experimental and philosophical methods to investigate issues in behavioural economics, normative economics, choice under uncertainty, the foundations of decision and game theory, the methodology of economics, and the evolution of social conventions. His current work focuses on the problem of reconciling behavioural and normative economics, and is synthesised in his recent book The Community of Advantage (Oxford University Press, 2018).

David Tuckett

David Tuckett is a Professor and Director of the University College London (UCL) Centre for the Study of Decision-Making under Uncertainty based in the Faculty of Brain Sciences and a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. Trained in Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis, he has authored several articles and books including, Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability. He is on the Management group of the ESRC-NIESR Rebuilding Macroeconomics network, led the EPSRC-funded CRUISSE Network - Challenging Radical Uncertainty in Science, Society and the Environment. His recent works include Narrative Theory of Monetary Policy (with Douglas Holmes) and Narratives as a Coordinating Device for Reversing Regional Disequilibrium (with Paul Collier).

John Vickers

John Vickers is a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and the Warden of All Souls College. Previously, he was Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, Chief Economist at the Bank of England and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Head of the Office of Fair Trading, and Chair of the UK's Independent Commission on Banking. His research interests mainly concern competition and regulation, including the theory of industrial organization and policy questions in antitrust and banking regulation.

Max Winkler

Max Winkler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with Joseph Henrich's Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab. He will join the Economics Department at the University of Exeter as Assistant Professor in September 2022. His research focuses on understanding social and cultural change and its consequences for economic development. He has specialized in analyzing text from large corpora of local newspapers to track cultural change across cities back into the 18th century.

Melanie Xue

Melanie Meng Xue is Assistant Professor of Economic History at the LSE. Her work explores the rise of women, the self-perpetuation of authoritarian regimes, and the evolution of antisocial behavior in the early modern and modern China. By tracing the impact of historical events over time and in various institutional settings, her research centers on the role of values, beliefs and norms in shaping economic and political disparities. Another stream of her research examines oral traditions and shows that folklore is a powerful measure of the historical component of values in contemporary society, connecting history and culture.