Departmental news

What research projects are you currently involved with?

Sometimes I call it ‘the economics of bad behaviour,’ but I’ve spent most of my career researching the economics, the political economy and the history of communism, mostly in Russia but also looking at Eastern Europe and China – so that’s my broad field. It’s very hard to do this work without also looking at conflict, so I’ve also spent a lot of time looking at the economic history of 20th century conflict.

Currently I’m working on a paper on the recruitment and management of KGB informers. About ten years ago I discovered the archive of the Lithuanian KGB, which is one of the few KGB archives that’s now open for research, and it’s got a mass of fascinating material. It’s all the more fascinating for me as I was a student in Moscow in the 1970s. There was a small group of us studying in Moscow University, and we were all aware that it was a police state but none of us had much idea of what that meant, so we had all sorts of questions that we could never answer for ourselves – did they care where we went, did they follow us, keep tabs on who we were friends with, the conversations we were having? Thanks to this archive I now know the answers to all of these questions. And they’re all yes!

My informers make up a very small sample – just 21 cases, but the documents are quite rare and therefore valuable. The documents were meant to be used to educate KGB officers in how people would come to them, and how they could make them productive as informers. This was quite a complicated process because often people said yes to recruitment without really meaning to, possibly because they were frightened, and then the task was to make them conscientious and loyal servants of the security police.

I look at this as an economist, because it’s about contracting, and it’s also about management and quality in delivering services. It’s curiosity-driven research – how did this really work? The paper I’m writing is looking at best practice because all these cases were described in order to explain how things ought to work, and we know from lots of other documentation that in reality many informers were a hopeless waste of time, and many handlers were incompetent. It’s not a representative sample but it’s an illuminating one because it shows you how they thought the security police ought to have worked in the right hands.

I was privileged to have the opportunity to visit the then-Soviet Union when I was still at school, at the height of the Cold War. This was another world – for some it was the adversary but for others it was also the alternative to capitalism.

What interested you about this area of research?

I got bitten by the bug early. I was privileged to have the opportunity to visit the then-Soviet Union when I was still at school, at the height of the Cold War. This was another world – for some it was the adversary but for others it was also the alternative to capitalism.

I was a student in the late 60s when most people that I knew had some sort of engagement in revolutionary student politics, so I had very strong personal reasons to be interested. And over a long period of time I learned that this was a world that was even weirder than it appeared on the surface.

When communism collapsed, a lot of people in my situation decided to go with transition economics and politics and policy making. I thought to myself no, I wanted to know what this world was really like on the inside, so I stayed with economic history, and started doing archival research which was relatively easy to do in the 90s. It was slightly adventurous but I had some excellent collaborators.

Until that point doing research on the Soviet economy was – by modern standards - just extraordinarily tough because we had to rely on official publications that were repetitive and boring and full of distortions and lies and the problem was to tell the distortions from the lies, in the case of the distortions to work out what was the methodology behind them that perhaps you could correct for, and this was often frustrating and soul destroying but it felt important because how else could you find out the truth? Then suddenly the walls collapsed and there was this vast archive of what my co-authors and I have described as the world’s best documented dictatorship. Every page was stamped Secret or Top Secret, and the opportunities were just immense.

After a while I begin to think: how do you investigate this system of secrecy? That was the question I asked myself then, and I didn’t really know what the answer was, but ten or 15 years later I realised that the body responsible for secrecy was the KGB, and I had in my hands the documents that would allow me to understand this system. This really was the most secretive society the world has ever known. You can see it today only in a place like North Korea. China is different, China has evolved a different system of rule that is compatible with the internet and mass media and foreign travel. The Soviet system was totalitarian rule for the era of print and paper and telephony, before peer-to-peer communication. It’s very hard for people of today to imagine the closed, claustrophobic nature of Soviet society.

What relevance do you hope your work might have for society?

You could say that what I do doesn’t have great practical value for today, it’s history – but it’s a part of history that is quite recent, has a lot of echoes in the present, and yet is poorly understood.

Ideas about socialism and communism continue to have echoes today, for example in the situation in Venezuela. Surveillance is still debated today, and my response on that is, you have to understand the purpose of the surveillance. The question we need to ask ourselves is what are the proper purposes of surveillance in a free society, and how much space should there be for privacy. I do think my research has something to tell us about that. I also think, generally speaking, if you do economics the primary thing you learn is that there’s an awful lot of ways of wasting money. I know a lot of special ways to lose money that are to do with the nature of state intervention and the way that states can try to control things, and the purposes of state control.

Why did you decide to become an economist?

My parents thought it would be very good if I became a lawyer. I wasn’t strongly against this but I wasn’t very interested. While I was still at school I saw a book in my local bookshop – I can still visualise it though I don’t have it any more - called The Essential Left. It had some basic writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and I thought ‘I wonder what this is’ and I went home and I read the Communist Manifesto. Which is a very exciting document, it’s very powerfully written, and I said to my dad ‘OK, so I’ve read this – is it true? And he said, to his credit, that he didn’t know. Then I thought, how do I find out? It seemed to me that I had to do economics, and because it was history I would also have to do history. In other words I was already interested in economic history, and because I had the opportunity to visit Russia when I was a schoolboy that was an additional motive, and I’d learnt a smattering of Russian at school, so that was the fuel, to take me a long way.

Why did you join the Economics Department at Warwick?

Warwick was then, as it is now, very committed to economic history. I had a first degree in economics and a PhD in modern history - so by modern standards I missed a few tricks in terms of the kind of training that PhD students now get in economics but nonetheless, there I was on the market.

Nick Crafts was already here as a fairly junior lecturer, but he was going on a year’s leave and I was his temporary replacement. I came for a year and I was very fortunate to stay.

Warwick has been a wonderful place to be. Right from the start, I had the sense that the department wanted to be at the forefront. It wanted to be policy relevant and it wanted to be research driven. And so the department was full of people who were doing cutting edge applied economics, and they didn’t care if you were interested in the present or the past. Moreover, if you were interested in the past they were ready to let you be interested in the story; they didn’t expect you just to grab the data and run. In global terms Warwick is a mainstream department. We do mainstream economics, but not defined in an exclusive or conservative way of establishing orthodoxy. Our people are always willing to draw in new ideas, take in things that were heterodox and put them to use, and it’s a very inclusive concept of the mainstream.

I also think the department has an ethos of self-betterment. The only way you can become better is by continually taking in new ideas and comparing yourself with the best and bringing the best to Warwick. We’ve always been very open to people visiting, they come to Warwick and we see if we’re as good as they are - and hopefully they’re better than we are and we can learn from them or even try to hire them, not just try to replicate ourselves in the same boring way. That sort of open-mindedness is truly valued.

What has been your most memorable experience during your time in the department?

To me, the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) exemplifies something that Warwick has achieved. CAGE came about just as I stepped down as head of department but we planned it while I was in post. I think it validates the idea that economic history can exist in its own right but also have something to say that’s going to resonate in society both generally and among people who are interested in policy.

In the years that CAGE has existed it has grown and developed its network of people outside Warwick. The range of issues that are being addressed in CAGE is fantastic: people who are not economists sometimes have a somewhat distorted idea that economics is just about finance and forecasting - which are obviously important - but it’s much more than that. It’s also about figuring out the world and where we came from and where we are going.

I think some of the message of economic history ought to be optimistic. There’s a lot of pessimism around, and academics are just as capable of pessimism as everyone else, whether it’s the state of the western alliance or the global economy or our own society as it faces up to Brexit. Economic history encourages us to take a long view, and I think the long view of the world should not be a pessimistic one.

In the last 200 years our world has been transformed in terms of the burden of disease and poverty and the position of women in society, and the number of children that survive childbirth and infancy and become educated, the number of girls who become educated. And that’s not to say that it’s a finished project, but there are lots of things going on that should give us confidence that we can face up to the challenges of the next 200 years and we should not give in to pessimism – which often drives people to do things that are quite unwise.

We need to take stock of the things that are at work that have enabled our world to improve, and economic history is one of the disciplines that can help us to do that.

Recent Publications

• Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The Economics of the Great War: A Centennial Perspective. A CEPR eBook (2018).
• R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939. Vol. 7 of The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. Palgrave MacMillan (2018).

Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

In March 2019 Mark became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences for his achievements as a leading scholar on the economic history of modern Russia, the comparative economics of the two World Wars, and the historical economics of violence and rule-breaking behaviour. He was formally welcomed to the Academy at a ceremony hosted by the President of the Academy, Sir Ivor Crewe, on 20 June 2019.

article updated on 24 June 2019

What research projects are you currently involved with?

I’m involved in a variety of projects – many of them are joint with Jeremy Smith, our head of department. He and I have a research collaboration which goes back approximately 20 years, in which we have looked at a variety of aspects regarding students entering university, being at university, and going on beyond university – by which what I mean is, we’ve looked at what are the characteristics of students associated with them performing very well, or less well, at university, and similarly, what determines, or is associated with, the kind of things they go on to do after university, whether that’s a postgraduate degree, or going into the labour market.

We’ve also looked at how things have changed over time, because over this period of time there’s been a huge increase in the participation of young people in higher education. The early cohorts of students whose data we were analysing were leaving university in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a period of time when the participation rate rose from around 14 per cent to around 30 per cent. Since then it’s grown to around 40 per cent. So one of our interests was looking at whether the financial return to a degree had changed over that period – because a simple approach might be to say there’s a big increase in supply, so the scarcity has gone down, and the labour market price might also go down. But we – and other research teams – have found that hasn’t happened, because at the same time that there has been a big increase in supply, there has been a big increase in demand as well, because the world of work has been changing. Technological change is biased towards skills, so those countries that want to stay competitive in the global marketplace should be investing in the skills of their young people through education and higher education. The work of the future will need those capabilities.

We’ve also looked at how the return to a degree – how much you earn with your degree compared to how much you might have earned had you not got a degree – has changed. When tuition fees were first brought in for Home/EU students, in 1998, the evidence that was cited by policymakers was that the return to a degree is something like £400,000 over a lifetime. In economics, we tend not to talk about a sum of money, because that becomes less meaningful over time, so the evidence that’s often cited by economists would be the percentage by which your earnings with a degree are higher than they are likely to have been – and the figure around which there’s a consensus is something like 15 to 20 per cent on average. So while our key finding is that there is still a very high return for getting a degree, as a caveat it’s important to note that there is a lot of variation around the average. Because there are no upfront fees it’s still a very good investment: if you’re one of the people for whom it turned out not to be a great financial return, you’re not indebted – the loan is eventually expunged. The evidence is that even the £9,000 fee doesn’t seem to have deterred applications from people from less affluent backgrounds, which is fantastic, but we shouldn’t be complacent about that, and the sector must never let governments be complacent about this. It’s the absence of upfront fees combined with income-contingent repayments that are absolutely crucial to this.

We also find there’s a lot of variation in graduate market outcomes by how well you do at university – in the language of economics, whether that’s a causal effect or a correlation is a research question still to be addressed properly. And the current research project that Jeremy and I have on the go, with Gianna Boero, is an attempt to establish whether there is a causal impact of having done well at university on your earnings.

Why did you choose this research field?

Jeremy and I have always had responsibilities within the department which included the management of the undergraduate and graduate programmes. At various times we’ve been Directors of Studies and Senior Tutors with responsibility for pastoral support – and in those roles we were interested in our own students: for example, we wanted to know whether students with certain A level subjects do better than others, to improve our admissions policies and our support mechanisms. And so we were interested in conducting statistical analysis of the relationship between student outcomes at university and the characteristics of those students.

Twenty-odd years ago it started with wanting to look at the data for our own students, and then we got ambitious and wondered if we could find data for the entire university, which would give us more robust results, and in the course of exploring that, we hit upon a Eureka moment, which was that we could get data on every student on every degree course in every university in the UK, going back for a number of decades. So suddenly we were dealing with around a million student records. Nowadays that sounds banal, because we’re in the world of big data, when people do analysis based on many millions of data points, but in the late 1990s, it felt like rather a lot of data points! And what we found remains one of the more memorable moments in my academic life. We found – and this has been replicated by many people since - that there was a big difference in the outcomes of students according to the kind of school they had attended before university. We found that on average, if you looked at two students, one of whom had been to an independent school, and another, in all other respects identical but who had been to a state school, the latter outperformed the former at university by a large margin. We found this in almost every subject, at almost every university.

And this demonstrates that while it’s quite right that admissions selectors place significant importance on prior qualifications, they’re not an absolute gold standard in identifying those with the greatest ability to benefit from a degree. We need to look more widely than merely at prior qualifications if we want to tap all available talent.

This analysis and the findings we established attracted more press and media attention than anything else I have worked on to date (coverage included items on the Today Programme, Newsnight, the Economist, the FT, most of the national newspapers and, especially, the Daily Mail!). The work has been influential in policy circles and within the HE sector.

Why did you decide to become an Economist?

It was a genuine desire to understand both what made countries rich and, more importantly, what within countries determined why some people were richer than others – a rather naïve 17-year old’s question! But fairness and equity are still a driving force in my economics, lying behind my work on student outcomes and widening participation, for example. Going back 40 years, I applied to the LSE. This was both because of its academic credentials, but also because of its institutional origins and for what it represented culturally. Paris had had its 1968 student revolts, and the nearest we had in the UK was the LSE, it had that kind of aura around it.

I loved my time at LSE and I wanted to do further study and research in Economics, so the next step was an MPhil in Economics at Oxford. I finished that in 1983 – a time of huge public expenditure cuts, when there were very few positions available in UK universities. I did 6 months in the Civil Service as a government economist and realised that actually my true calling was a research career in economics

Why did you join the Economics department at Warwick?

Warwick was then, as now, regarded as one of the very top departments for Economics in the UK. When I came for my interview in 1986 it also stood out as a department where the working culture was very collegial and friendly and supportive – and, happily, that is also the case in 2019.

What are your research interests and what current research projects are you are involved in?

I was originally an economic theorist and I retain an interest in trying to understand how people act in different situations. These days I tend to use experiments to get at what is underpinning people’s behaviour. I have around ten or so projects at different stages and most include either laboratory or field experiments. To give some examples, I am working with some of my students to try to understand how mindfulness changes the way we think, and on the role of personality in how we form beliefs about others, and with a former student (now in Oxford) on why people might ignore good advice. I am also running a field experiment attempting to understand what motivates people to become organ donors. A lot of my other work relates to subjective wellbeing, or happiness: for instance, my first paper on the subject established that happier people are more productive, but more recently I have work that shows that happier people can also be less cooperative! This was something of a surprise but actually fits in with some recent work in neuroscience on the way happier people think.

You were invited to join the World Wellbeing Panel – could you tell us more about this

The World Wellbeing Panel is a one-of-a-kind group of some of the leading “happiness economists” in the world including people like Richard Easterlin (who pretty much founded the area and is known for his paradox: that richer nations are not necessarily filled with happier people), Richard Layard, and my colleagues at Warwick, Andrew Oswald and Nick Powdthavee. The idea is that each month we are asked questions drawn up by academics, policy-makers or journalists about happiness and policy. For instance, a recent question we were asked concerned the role of gender stereo-types and their effect on happiness, and it was interesting to see so many different opinions from the panel.

Why did you choose to become a researcher?

I have always loved puzzles and to me that is what research is all about: solving puzzles. I spent a year in the mid-1990s as an economic consultant. It mainly entailed using other people’s research to support the activity of large businesses. It was an interesting enough job but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. To keep the puzzle analogy going, I think when I was a consultant I was still trying to solve puzzles but using the solutions developed by other people and that was just not satisfying enough. Now I am still playing the same game, but this time I am working out the answers myself (or working them out with the help of other researchers who are willing to work with me!)

For instance, I mentioned a project I am working on right now that looks at why people ignore good advice. This is a genuine puzzle and I now have a better feel for why people will often accept lower payoffs rather than take advice and do things differently. It seems to be related to the “sunk cost fallacy” (people feel that they have invested in their beliefs and so are reluctant to change them even if they know it would benefit them to do so) and also psychological factors like envy and self-esteem.

What has been the impact of your research nationally and internationally?

The work I undertook with Andrew Oswald and Eugenio Proto on the positive effects of happiness on productivity in the workplace has had a lasting impact, at least it seems to remain a topical issue for the media if that is any indication. I think we have now well over a hundred and fifty news stories on our research spanning several years and many countries, and there are still media hits coming out every month. We know that managers and firms are considering how to change working environments to capitalise on decades of research in this area and hopefully the media excitement about our work is bringing it to the attention of employers who will find our contribution useful. Certainly when we have gone out and talked with private and public sector managers and practitioners they seem very enthusiastic: for example, an event organised by CAGE and the Social Market Foundation in London a few years ago was packed, though perhaps right now (with Brexit on the horizon) happiness and productivity is not foremost on their minds.

More recently, I have been working on building an index of national happiness using text: we have a reasonable measure of national happiness for recent decades based on survey data but nothing for the past, and by examining what people read and wrote we think we can provide an interesting way to trace how national happiness has evolved over a period of centuries. My co-authors (Eugenio Proto and Thomas Hills) and I have spent a fair bit of time promoting this project everywhere we can (the World Bank, Treasury, Office of National Statistics and many other places besides) and hopefully when our final efforts see print (the work is under revision for a journal right now) we will be able to convince people to start using it to better understand what has been driving national happiness over the last 200 years.

What has been your most memorable experience during your time in the department?

Warwick Economics is a big and busy department with so much happening and it has been great to be a part of it. I don’t think I would be working on subjective wellbeing if it wasn’t for Andrew Oswald’s influence, and I have enjoyed working with Andrew and Eugenio a great deal. I loved speaking at the CAGE policy launch for our “Understanding Happiness” briefing report: being on a panel with the former cabinet secretary (Lord O’Donnell) and the then head of the Government Economic Service (Sir Dave Ramsden) was a fantastic experience, and being invited to join the World Wellbeing Panel was a nice form of recognition. One of the most fun times I had was actually when I was on leave at the Centre for Experimental Social Science in Oxford: it was great returning to Oxford as a Warwick person, seeing one of the oldest universities in the world with the perspective bestowed on me by one of its youngest rivals. I also enjoy teaching and was very happy to receive a University teaching commendation: there are countless great teaching moments that stick in my memory and it is hard to beat a standing ovation after a good lecture!

However, if I am being honest there is one clear winner over the last 11 years at Warwick: the birth of my son in 2009. Since I need to somehow link that to the department, then let me say coming along to a staff and family event organised by the department, with my new-born son wearing his “microeconomist” sleepsuit!

Dr Claudia Rei discusses her recently published paper and upcoming research papers

Tell us a bit about your background and how long have you been at Warwick?

I am originally from Portugal where I did my undergraduate studies in Economics. I worked for a couple of years before I went to grad school in the US, after which I got a job at Vanderbilt. I worked there for 8 years before I arrived at Warwick last September.

Your recent paper on Holocaust refugees was published as the lead article on the European Review of Economic History – could you give a brief overview of your findings?

This is joint work with Matthias Blum (Queen's University Belfast). We study the last wave of Jewish refugees to escape Europe after the outbreak of the Second World War, all of whom travelled from Lisbon to New York City between 1940 and 1942, when Lisbon became the last major port of departure. Leaving Europe before 1940 was troublesome but there were still several European ports providing regular passenger traffic to the Americas. After 1940, emigration was increasingly difficult and getting to Lisbon was both a matter of wealth and luck; by mid-1942 it was nearly impossible for Jews to leave Europe due to mass deportations to concentration camps in the East. We use average height as a key indicator to assess health and human capital of these wartime migrants.

Our findings show these migrants belonged to a higher social background when compared to the populations in source countries, that is, all migrants in our sample were positively selected from the original population. This pattern is stronger in females than males. Even so, non-Jews were more positively selected than Jews regardless of gender. The height gap between Jews and non-Jews is not associated with skill or wealth differences, and it disappears once we control for migration initiative as measured by the timing of migration and prior migrant status. That we still find positive selection in refugees leaving long after the seizure of power by the Nazis' in Germany is more likely an indication that they had good reasons to stay behind, than the simple lack of migration initiative. If you work on a contract and you lease an apartment, the decision to leave is relatively easy: you just have to quit your job and terminate your lease. If you own a factory or a shop and you employ people in your own business, you will hold out until the last minute when you leave everything behind and run for your life. The latter seem to be more prevalent in the last wave of World War II refugees that we study in our paper.

What issues were you faced with when conducting this research

The data for this project is accessible on Ancestry.com, but scraping the information from that website infringes copyright laws. We had to extract the data from ship manifests directly from the original source: the New York Passenger Arrival Records located at the United States National Archives in Washington DC. The collection is comprised of 9,567 microfilm rolls with passenger lists on every (sea or air) vessel arrived in the Port of New York between 1820 and 1957 originating in any port in the world. Our time frame and single port of origin limited the spectrum of search to 243 microfilm rolls. This particular collection is directly accessible to registered users who can themselves get the microfilm boxes, load the film in the reading machine, visualize it on a computer screen, and save the relevant images on a flash drive. A week and 3,000+ picture files afterwards we had the data in hand. Then we entered the transcription stage into excel spreadsheets, a process that took much longer.

Are there any follow-up plans to your research?

Yes. We are interested in understanding the transformation of economic migrants into war refugees so we focus on European migration into the United States from the post-open door policy period up to World War II (1925-1940). We have liaised with Alex Wulfers (Oxford) who studied 900,000 migrants departing Bremen to the Americas between 1920 and 1939, and with Ariell Zimran (Vanderbilt) whose work on Italian migrants into the United States between 1907 and 1925 provides a glimpse of one of the last groups to migrate before the imposition of any restrictions on migration. Together, we have applied to the US-based genealogy organization FamilySearch to get data on all arrivals into the United States between 1925 and 1940, so to understand how these migrants differed from migrants going elsewhere and how the composition of US migrants changed with the historical developments in Nazi Germany. Unlike the German records, the United States Immigration Services kept records on individual height allowing for a comprehensive anthropometric study.

Do you have any working papers/research coming through in the next year?

I have a couple of projects on historical state capacity, that is the presence of the state in the nineteenth century when modern European states emerged. The objective is to understand if places with access to state services historically are any different presently from places that did not experience such services in the past though they may have gained access to them at a later stage. Does historical exposure to the state affect current outcomes? The first project studies the relationship between postal presence in Portugal in 1875 and voter participation in democratic elections post-1975. The historic presence of postmen is associated with higher voter turnout in any election, but lower participation in local relative to national elections suggesting more concern for the national than the local government. The second project involves the extraction of biographical information of all members of parliament in the Portuguese constitutional monarchy (1834-1910). In that context, state presence is measured by the arrival of the telegraph, which changed access to information in nineteenth century Portugal: places adopting the telegraph earlier were potentially more informed about the candidates they elected. The goal of this project is to understand the determinants behind the selection of the political class, not just in nineteenth-century Portugal but also in fledgling democracies today.

What do you see yourself doing in 5 years’ time?

Hopefully I'll continue working on exciting research projects where the search for answers is not trivial and I still get surprised with the outcomes

What do you like doing when you are not studying/researching?

I like hiking and going to the movies but I do those activities very differently wherever I locate. At Vanderbilt I had a hiking group, which I organized weekly and I always had company to hike on Sunday mornings, but I mostly went to the movie theatre on my own. At Warwick it's the exact opposite: I send out a weekly movie email to a group of interested cinephiles and I always have company to the movie theatre, but no one seems interested in hiking.

Who has influenced you the most?

Professionally, my masters advisor who saw in me a future researcher before I could see it myself; if I had not been matched to him by the scramble system at NYU, I would not have proceeded into a PhD program and I would be a very different person today. Personally, probably the person that influenced me the most was my father whom, everybody tells me, I take after quite a bit.

Dr Claudia Rei, Senior Teaching Fellow, Department of Economics

Professor Andrew Oswald talks to us about his research and its impact on society

What research projects are you currently involved with?

I’m doing quite a lot of work on bosses. One of my most recently published papers is on the importance of what we call ‘technically competent’ bosses – we show in data from the UK and the US that the single strongest predictor of your job satisfaction is your boss’s competence. You might think that’s obvious - but the research literature is not focused on that, it’s focused on lots of other things, so we show that this is the strongest statistical predictor.

In the latest paper that has just been submitted – How common are bad bosses? - we calculate the number of bad bosses in 30 different countries – I shan’t tell you the number, because the paper is still in press. A random sample of about 30,000 people answered questions about their boss – does your boss give good advice, is your boss good at providing communication – a whole set of questions, and we asked them to rate their bosses from very good to very poor. And we aggregate it. We’re not expecting bosses to be outstanding, but we’re looking for the proportion of ones that get consistently negative scores on everything. We’re looking for patterns that are common to 30 countries.

I’m also working on suicide – I’ve been working on happiness for decades so it’s time to look at the dark side! Suicide of course is a very important, very sad phenomenon - about one in 8,000 people in any year in Western society kill themselves. And we’re looking at the peak age for suicide risk, which is approximately age 45, and trying to understand this. I think it’s a very important social problem.

Why did you choose happiness as your research field?

I came into Economics as a late teenager, because I was worried about unemployment and inflation, so I thought ‘I’ll solve them’ – and after that I got interested in human wellbeing. It seemed to me that nothing could be more important for any social scientist to understand.

There’s now a whole field on this – but twenty years ago people didn’t see the sense in it - it didn’t compute – it didn’t register. A young colleague (Andrew Clark, a Warwick grad, and then a PhD student) and I ran the first-ever economics of happiness conference, which was at LSE in 1993, put posters all over LSE, set out a hundred seats - and nobody came. Well, seven people came. It just did not register, but it’s such an obvious thing to study now.

I wanted to get to the bottom of the economic influences on human wellbeing, and then you get drawn into the other influences, and I’ve moved away from being a straight economist into becoming, in part, more of a behavioural scientist.

There’s a lot of talk these days about interdisciplinary research. The first papers we wrote, in 1991 and 1992, we were quoting psychology journals - it’s an area where fields are blended. My own view is that it is a bad idea to say ‘You should be doing interdisciplinary research.’ What people should do is work on topics that matter, and if you work on a topic, almost any topic relates to all sorts of other ones. In my own field, of human wellbeing, you’ve got health, psychology, history – all sorts of people.

Loads of people have now moved into the area but the economics of happiness to a very considerable extent started at Warwick. Before that, there was really only one fairly obscure article, which was in the 1970s by Richard Easterlin, who is now very glad that this research field has emerged to such prominence. You just have to accept as an academic that success means eventually people will forget where the original ideas came from – and that’s why we have universities.

What impact do you hope your research will have on society?

I hope a lot – I came into Economics to try to make the world a better place. I’ll be pleased if our work leads governments to change their criterion for success. There’s been an astonishing change in that way, though a lot of it isn’t visible yet. David Cameron was a big supporter of our early work, as was Tony Blair. Just two weeks ago I was in the Treasury, around a long table with Treasury officials looking down at my happiness equations, and trying to decide if they could bring this in to how they made public expenditure decisions.

Why did you join the Economics department at Warwick?

I like modern universities, I like campus universities. Oxford is about 850 years old and I did feel, there’s really nothing I can do that will alter the reputation of Oxford University. Whereas at Warwick - I’ve been here about half the life of the University, I was one of the very first people to go on the Today programme and Newsnight - Warwick has suited me very well. Vice Chancellors through the years have been very tolerant, they let me write about whatever I think is interesting. And I do consciously think, what’s the best way to contribute to Warwick. The department will be here long after I have gone, the trajectory is very encouraging. We compete on the world stage.

When you’re young, it’s an incredibly cut-throat business. There’s a world competition going on, and the Americans are working 75 hours a week. I went to Princeton in 1983, and I went there as a pretty cocky youngish man, I thought I was very hot stuff, the hardest working youngish economist at Oxford. And then I discovered that the Assistant Professors at Princeton went home when the lights in the library went off – around 11.30pm – and they worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday. And that makes you realise what you’re up against – the work rate is incredible. But as you get older, you start to think more about other people, and whole departments, and what you do changes a bit – I’m not so focused on getting my own name into the newspaper now. You have to decide, do you want publicity or do you want to do the science that will help change the world?

What has been your most memorable experience during your time in the department?

In the last quarter of a century?! It’s so hard to make a choice. Perhaps some of the early media stuff? Things are much calmer now but in the late 1990s almost every day I got contacted by a media person. I remember in around 2000 I was watching the BBC news and the presenter came on and said ‘here’s a happiness equation from the University of Warwick’, in a kind of ‘can you believe it!,’ tone, and there it was on the screen. And the first time I went live on Newsnight, to be interviewed

What is the next challenge for you?

One of the interesting things about a long career is that you reach a point where you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do any more. I published my first articles in the 1970s. I’ve written one or two books, so I may do another. The trouble is that doing research is so incredibly interesting! My favourite thing is to sit down on a quiet day and discover something new – that’s just a fantastic experience.

What research projects are you currently involved with?

I work on various applied economics topics, looking at real world data and using it to understand what’s going on in different situations, and how things might be improved. My interest is mainly in developing countries, and I am working on a project investigating poverty traps in Bangladesh. I’m also interested in how Governments can help to alleviate poverty, both in developing and developed countries, and this starts with them being able to raise funds. This is what I’m looking at in my other main project at the moment – looking at tax compliance in the UK.

In Bangladesh, the data pose a dilemma. While Economics 101 says that over time people’s incomes in poor countries should grow, so that they `catch up' with those in richer countries, in rural Bangladesh we see that people are persistently poor from generation to generation. This is sometimes called a poverty trap. In principle there are a number of ways that this could come about, but none of them exactly square with what we see. My research looks at the possibility that we were looking in the wrong place: recently we've studied whether particular households were or weren't in the trap, but maybe the trap actually exists at the village level. This makes sense because we know that in developing countries people within a community support each other – your harvest fails and your neighbours give you some money – so maybe we should think about the whole community being inside or outside the trap. To study this I needed data about a large number of communities, and I got data from an NGO that was working in a large number of villages handing out cows to try and help people out of poverty.

I found that although the programme had a positive effect, by handing out the same number of cows in a different way there could have been an even bigger impact. Escaping the poverty trap doesn’t just require a programme that increases current income, but also an increased ability to invest in the future. By providing enough cows to each village, one could get to the point that some of the income from these cows could be used for further investment (like buying another cow), enabling the community to grow their future incomes and escape the poverty trap.

Why did you choose this as your research field?

I am interested in the ability that economics has to improve people's lives, and particularly the lives of those living in poverty. The ultimate goal of economic policy should be to give people the opportunity and independence to make their own choices. As a result I study how we can make policy that helps people to increase their income, so they have better options to choose from while retaining the autonomy to make their own choices. This might be getting money to them directly, or making public investments such as health, education, and infrastructure, that can increase their earnings.

I don’t want to do research sitting in an ivory tower, getting published in a journal but where no-one ever actually does anything with it. That's why I work with real world data, and I hope that my applied research will ultimately have an impact on policy and the world. As part of my work, I therefore also think it’s important to talk to policymakers who can implement things, and to the public at large, because they need to understand what the issues are.

Why did you join the Economics department at Warwick?

As my research interests are pretty broad, Warwick is a particularly nice department for me. We have a lot of people in across a range of areas, so for any project I work on, there’s someone to talk to. Also people here value you for working on interesting questions rather than fitting into a box. If it’s interesting, if it will publish well and have an influence on policy, that’s enough.

What has been your most memorable experience during your time in the department?

Well, there was the joy of adversity recently when we had a power cut! Everything died, the Social Sciences building was shut down, and the next morning the Economics department had set itself up in the library, sitting together, chatting and working. The whole department was in one room – the admin team reorganised all the lectures and kept the students informed – and given that everything fell apart at 4 o’clock one evening, it was quite incredible that we had the show back on the road at 10 o’clock the next morning. And it was kind of fun!

The other thing I’ve really enjoyed was the Warwick Economics Summit. I was impressed by the students organising something of this scale: Four continents worth of people, amazing high-profile speakers including Nobel Prize winners and Prime Ministers – and me, as well. It’s completely run by the undergraduates, they really do the whole thing. It says a lot about the quality of the students we have here, and the international reputation of the department.

What is the next challenge for economics?

It’s always dangerous to predict these things!

Economics in general will always have things to study in a way that’s slightly different from the other sciences, because we’re a social science. Many results depend on the ways people interact with one another and the social and institutional environment. The answer to a question that we have today isn’t going to be the answer that we will have in ten or twenty years, because the means of interaction will change. If you think about how people used to get information about jobs, say in the 1970s, and you think about how people get access to information about jobs now, these kind of things change in a way that mean the answers to questions that we have studied before will be different over time.

The techniques we have access to are also changing rapidly. My tax data covers ten million people a year over 15 years, and a whole sequence of variables. Though ‘big data’ gets a bit too much hype, it is true that having access to better computing tools and more data does allow us to tackle questions that we haven’t tackled before.