George Ward

Junior Research Fellow

University of Oxford

George is a Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford. He completed my PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. The guiding thread throughout my research is the study of human wellbeing.

His current research focuses on well-being in the workplace and builds from the basic empirical observation, which he has established in recent work, that how people feel at and about their work varies significantly across firms—even within tightly defined industries and locations.

A related line of his research is focused on political behaviour and public policy. He has studied the links between economic growth and happiness, the well-being dynamics of unemployment and job search, as well as the emotional foundations of voting and electoral outcomes. Through a series of papers, he has explored how different measures of subjective wellbeing predict political beliefs and voting behaviour at scale. This work has examined incumbent voting patterns in elections across Europe and the USA, and in the last few years, he has turned my attention to trying to better understand the ways in which human wellbeing (or the lack of it) has shaped the global rise of populism and political polarization. 

His research draws from multiple academic fields and has been published in leading journals across multiple disciplines, including management (Management Science), economics (Review of Economics and Statistics), psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist), and political science (American Journal of Political Science). Methodologically, his research uses field experiments, survey experiments, computational methods, and causal inference techniques combined with large-scale sources of digital trace and other observational data.