Research on Monday Rotterdam

Speaker(s)
Paul Frijters (London School of Economics, United Kingdom)
Date
Monday, 16 April 2018
Location
Rotterdam

Wellbeing is knocking on the door of policy makers in many countries, including the UK, Dubai, New Zealand, France, Italy, and of course Bhutan. There is over 50 years of data and analyses on nearly every country in the world, but still, very few real policy initiatives or effects. To professionalize the wellbeing effort, we want to set up the first micro-macro model of wellbeing, tailored to the data and interests of the UK. We thus build up our model one major potential policy initiative at the time, starting with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for depressed/anxious adults and Incredible Years parenting intervention for children with conduct problems. In this endeavour we face many unusual problems: how to integrate findings from different disciplines using different measurements and different causation paradigms? Whose wellbeing do we care about? What empirical measure is our headline measure? What are the main macro-lessons to code up? Which time-frame to use and how to think about the far future? Which interventions are the most promising to populate models with? How do you actually combine partial-equilibrium randomista coefficients into a whole model? The lecture will be about what our current plans are and a discussion on what can be done better.