Richard Layard

Centre for Economic Performance

Professor Lord Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he was until 2003 the founder-director of the Centre for Economic Performance. He now heads the Centre’s Programme on Well-Being. Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords and is a keen advocate of making subjective well-being of the people the central objective of governments. A labour economist by specialization, he made major contributions on unemployment, inflation, inequality and post-Communist reform. He was an early advocate of the welfare-to-work approach to European unemployment. His influential book Happiness – Lessons from a New Science was published in 2005 and has sold 150,000 copies in 20 languages.