The Explore Econ 2025 Stone Centre Prize Goes to Charlie Harrison

The Explore Econ 2025 Stone Centre Prize Goes to Charlie Harrison

We would like to send our thanks to UCL’s Dr Ramin Nassehi, Stone Centre advisory board member Professor Parama Chaudhury, and their team for an excellent edition of Explore Econ 2025. Many interesting papers were presented and debated by the cohort of extremely talented undergraduate economics students.

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Stone Centre co-director Wendy Carlin attended to announce the winner of the Stone Centre Prize.  The prize went to third-year PPE student Charlie Harrison, who presented new research on happiness “Scaling the Easterlin Paradox: Measuring Life Events on Stretching Happiness Scales”. She said “There is much discussion about using happiness as a measure of wellbeing alongside more traditional measures like GDP per capita. This puts the spotlight on the reliability of measures of happiness and how they relate both to GDP per capita and inequality. Charlie’s research is timely and important.”

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We caught up with Charlie following the event for a quick chat about his paper, the Stone Centre, and his hopes for the future.

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Hi Charlie, congratulations on winning the Stone Centre Prize. Please share with us an overview of your paper:

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My project looked at whether stagnant happiness at a country level was due to changing reporting standards and a change toward stricter reporting. I found evidence that the gap between a ten out of ten life and a zero out of ten life was growing. That might be one reason why usual measures of nominal happiness have stayed constant.

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How did you hear about the Stone Centre?

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I heard about the Stone Centre at the conference last year, where I saw my friend presenting. I’m here today because of the prize and I’m now a scholar, which is wonderful.

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Your paper has implications for one of the Stone Centre’s key areas of research, inequality.

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Yes, there are implications that arise from the inequality of happiness, because if the gap between a ten out of ten life and a zero out of ten life is growing, that means that the gap between the happiest and the least happy in society is also growing.

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What did you enjoy most about this project, and how do you hope to continue your work in the future?

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I’d love to publish this work in a top happiness studies journal and continue my work in the future. I think I’d like to do an economics PhD; I really love research. I loved the process of writing this project; it was by far and away the most meaningful thing I’ve done academically at UCL, and I want more of it!

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Congratulations to Charlie from all of us here at the Stone Centre, and best of luck with your future research.

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