Kate Orkin
Kate Orkin is an Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. She is an applied microeconomist, working in labour, public, and development economics. Her research studies frictions in urban developing country labour markets that prevent young people from finding work and interventions that can reduce these frictions. Recent work has been published in the American Economic Review and Journal of the European Economic Association. Since receiving her PhD from Oxford in 2016, she has led fieldwork funded by £3mn in research grants from the National Science Foundation, UKRI, PEDL, JPAL, the Medical Research Council, the Gates Foundation, and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia. She has worked extensively at the interface of research and policy to take successful evidence-based interventions to scale. Since 2020, she has worked pro-bono as an advisor to the South African government, advising on design and fiscal incidence modeling for a new cash grant and active labour markets program for the unemployed, which delivered £7bn in funds to 10.5 million beneficiaries from 2020 to the present.