Kate Orkin
Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government
Dr Kate Orkin is Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Supernumerary Fellow of Merton College. Kate completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She is an affiliate at the CEPR labour and development programmes, JPAL, IZA and the Centre for Study of African Economies. She has long-running collaborations with institutions in the Global South, both the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town and Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics in Nairobi, where she is an affiliate.
Kate's work is in labour, public, behavioural and development economics. She studies market failures or patterns in decision-making that prevent people in low- and middle-income countries finding work or improving their earnings over time. She creates new interventions with NGOs and governments which aim to tackle these barriers and test these in large-scale field experiments. Her research has been mainly in three areas: frictions in urban developing country labour markets that prevent young people finding work or reduce the quality of matches between firms and workers; the role of mental health in labour market outcomes; and whether psychological interventions can improve investment and labour supply.
