Andrew Clark - Biography#

Andrew Clark's work has largely focussed on the interface between psychology, sociology and economics; in particular, using job and life satisfaction scores, and other psychological indices, as proxy measures of utility. One particular research question has been that of relative utility or comparisons (to others like you, to others in the same household, and to yourself in the past), finding evidence of such comparisons with respect to both income and unemployment. This work has spilled over into theoretical and empirical work on following behaviour and learning from others' actions. Recent work has involved collaboration with psychologists to map out habituation to life events (such as job loss, marriage, and divorce) using long-run panel data, and the use of cohort data to trace out the relationship between family background and childhood events, on the one hand, and adult outcomes (including those pertaining to subjective well-being), on the other.