What do people want from the economic policies that shape their lives?
The Policy Preferences Lab runs large-scale surveys and randomized experiments to understand people’s attitudes to economic policies and how governments can design policies that are effective and publicly acceptable.
Select a country or theme to see the surveys and experiments we have done there.
Evidence on what the public thinks,
built for policymakers
Effective policymaking often requires building public support, yet around the world we actually know very little about citizens’ beliefs and preferences about the policies that shape their lives. The Policy Preferences Lab works to close that gap.
The Lab brings together a global network of researchers and policy partners to study how people understand and respond to economic policy. Our work focuses on public attitudes toward taxes, transfers, subsidies, inequality and major economic reforms, with an emphasis on evidence that can improve policy design.
We design and run large-scale surveys and randomized experiments to measure policy preferences, test how information changes them, and feed the results directly back into policy design.
Our research has been supported by partners including the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, DFAT, FCDO, GIZ, NORAD, USAID, Oxfam, and UNICEF.
Christopher Hoy
Christopher Hoy is an applied microeconomist specializing in measuring and understanding people’s beliefs and preferences about economic policies. His research has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, featured in top media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Economist, and the BBC, and cited around 2,500 times.