Andrew E. Clark MSc, PhD

Andrew Clark is a CNRS Research Professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE). He previously held posts at Dartmouth, Essex, CEPREMAP, DELTA, the OECD, and the University of Orléans.

His 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. The broad area is social interactions and social learning.

One research field 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 evidence for and the implications of the following behavior 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. In addition, direct measures of utility allow direct tests of popular models of the labor market. In this spirit, his work has looked at unemployment, quits, and labor market rents.