Kristin F. Butcher

Kristin F. Butcher (she/her/hers) is a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and former director of the Center on Children and Families. She is vice president and director of Micro Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is the inaugural holder of the Marshall I. Goldman Chair in Economics at Wellesley College, where she chaired the economics department for six years. She is an applied micro economist whose research focuses on children and families, immigration, health, criminal justice, labor economics, social mobility, and higher education.

Butcher earned her doctorate in economics at Princeton University and holds master’s degrees in economics from Princeton and the London School of Economics. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at Wellesley College. She has held positions as a senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, faculty positions at Virginia Tech and Boston College, as well as visiting faculty positions at Princeton and MIT.

Butcher’s research has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Peterson Foundation.