Welcome!

Hello, welcome to my site. I am the  Director of  Young Lives at Oxford University 4 days a week and  Professor at Lancaster University for one day a week.  I am  a development economist by training but a fan of mixed-methods. 

I was an Associate Professor at Heriot-Watt University from 2013 until July 2019; British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow  (2010-2013) in the Economics department at Oxford University and Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College.  I am a research associate with the Centre for the Study of African Economies in Oxford and Grupo de Analisis para el Desarollo, GRADE in Lima. In a previous existence as a civil servant, I worked for the UK Department for International Development (now UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, FCDO) as an economist and as an ODI Fellow in the Central Bank of the Gambia. 

My research interests are around child development broadly defined, and using the tools of applied microeconomics, often using panel or longitudinal datasets.  I am interested in how risk affects the lives of poor boys, girls, men and women, the impact of unexpected events (shocks) on various outcomes such as nutrition, schooling and parental investments. This translates into inequality of learning outcomes and skills in adolescence and early adulthood, as well as differential labour market outcomes. and I investigate the effectiveness of policy in remediating such inequalities, often using the Young Lives dataset. I also have an interest in poverty  and inequality measurement, particularly the measurement of poverty over time (chronic poverty). I am beginning to work in experimental economics (in the field, mainly) and have been involved in experiments in the USA, Uganda and Somalia. I have worked or lived in Ethiopia, The Gambia, India, Peru, Senegal, Uganda and Vietnam. 

Aside from development economics, I am working on the importance of role models in educational choices (thus far in the USA and Somalia, with Danila Serra of Texas A&M), and on the relationship between economic inequality and human rights (with Gillian MacNaughton of UMass Boston, and Diane Frey of San Francisco State -edited book forthcoming). 

My email address is catherine(dot)porter@lancaster(dot)ac(dot)uk or (at)qeh.ox.ac.uk.