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Kristen Cooper is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Chair of the Department of Economics and Business at Gordon College, a liberal arts college on Boston's north shore. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University and has been a faculty member since 2013. Her academic leadership and teaching focus on microeconomics, public policy, environmental economics, and Christian perspectives on economic life.
- B.A., Gordon College
- Ph.D., Cornell University, Applied Economics and Management
Her research centers on welfare and behavioral economics, with a strong emphasis on the development and critique of well-being indicators as alternatives or complements to GDP. She explores how subjective well-being can be measured rigorously and used in policy analysis, addressing issues such as scale-use heterogeneity and interpersonal comparability. Her work spans experimental and theoretical approaches to bounded rationality, strategic decision-making, and consumer behavior in markets for fast fashion and durable goods.
Her recent publications reveal a consistent focus on constructing valid, theoretically grounded well-being indices using survey data and stated preferences. She investigates the welfare implications of environmental policies, ethanol subsidies, and the signaling value of consumption. Her research often involves interdisciplinary collaboration with leading economists such as Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball.
- Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Universidad de La Laguna, Spain (2019)
Prof. Cooper is actively involved in academic service, presenting her work at major conferences including the American Economic Association and Wharton’s Normative Ethics and Welfare Economics Conference. She advises on pedagogical approaches to teaching welfare economics and integrates ethical and faith-based reflection into her curriculum. She is a member of the American Economic Association and the Association of Christian Economists, reflecting her dual commitment to rigorous scholarship and values-based economic inquiry.
She leads research initiatives on national well-being measurement, contributes to policy discussions through publications with the IMF’s Finance & Development magazine, and continues to develop methodologies for aggregating personal well-being into national indices that account for inequality and demographic variation.
