Welcome to my website. Thanks for stopping by!
I am an Aletta Jacobs Professor in the Economics of Well-being and a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. I also serve as an Editor of the Journal of Population Economics.
I am passionate about research related to the economics of happiness and transition economies.
My current projects are centered around the implications of technology for workers’ tasks and well-being. See, for example, this working paper.
More generally, I care about the health and (subjective) well-being consequences of migration, labor market arrangements and automation, and entrepreneurship. Having grown up in Bulgaria (and yes, it was quite turbulent and unpleasant), I also feel a connection to the region and investigate the historical and contemporary determinants of socio-economic developments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In addition to science and the academe, I care a lot about public policy and societal impact – and I have worked in tanks and international institutions, such as the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the World Bank. I like to be connected to public policy (which is my passion and that’s why I chose to do a PhD in it) – I am a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Bruegel, and a Fellow at GLO.
NEWS? We (Richard Rijnks, Femke Cnossen, and I) organized two well-being workshops in April, 2023, including one on automation and well-being – check out the summaries of what we did here.
Let us know if we should continue these.