Kate Orkin

Short bio

I am an Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. I am an affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) (Development and Labour programmes), Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), International Growth Centre (IGC), and the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA). I sit on the management committee at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE).

My work is in labour, public, behavioural and development economics. I study market failures or patterns in decision-making that prevent people in low- and middle-income countries finding work or improving their earnings over time. My current work focuses on search and matching frictions in developing country labour markets; credit constraints; and the role of psychological factors like mental health and aspirations in economic decision-making. I create new interventions with NGOs and governments which aim to tackle these barriers and test these in large-scale field experiments, producing both papers relevant to academic debates and findings which can be applied in policy and programme design.

Since 2020 I have worked as an advisor to the South African government on design of social protection for the unemployed. This has led to a new monthly cash grant of ZAR370 being rolled out to 10.5 million unemployed people, the first grant for all unemployed adults in Africa, at an annual cost of $4.2 billion. Our joint work has been awarded the ESRC Public Policy Impact Prize, a Vice-Chancellors' Impact Award, and an Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Award.

My CV is here.

Here are my research and teaching statements.

Email: kate.orkin [at] bsg.ox.ac.uk. Personal assistant: eva.lovejoy [at] bsg.ox.ac.uk.

CURRENTLY HIRING:

1) Nairobi based research assistant (economics/stata background, field experience): any nationality, can be sponsored for a visa. Apply here, closing Aug 8.

2) Joburg based research assistant (economics/stata background, field experience): only SA residents. Apply here, rolling applications.

3) Remote data engineer (SQL required, ideally R/python/stata). Fully remote. Any nationality. Job spec here, rolling applications.

4) Oxford-based Project Finance and Grants Manager. Job spec here, closing Sept 22.

Summary of research

I have three strands of research:

1. How to design and implement labour market programs to improve employment, earnings and productivity, with a focus on helping jobseekers search more effectively; improving the number and quality of jobs firms offer; and increasing hiring of disadvantaged groups:

Giving unemployed youth information about their relative place in the skills distribution and enabling them to share this information credibly (on certified reports) with employers increases employment and wages (published in AER).
Giving jobseekers more information about their skills, even if they can't signal this to employers, helps them target their search toward jobs aligned with their comparative advantage (revise and resubmit at AEJ-Applied).
We are testing whether improving the information on workers’ skills used to select workers recruited for entry-level jobs improves firm-branch-level outcomes: match quality, turnover, and hiring.

2. Whether interventions from psychology – to treat poor mental health or teach goal-setting and planning – improve economic outcomes and could be viable public policy interventions; and

Interventions to encourage women to visualise the future increase take-up of water chlorination and reduce child diarrhea (published at JEEA).
A short video exposing farmers to role models similar to themselves who had succeeded in business or economic activities increases labour supply and education investment after five years in Ethiopia (revise and resubmit at QJE).
In a meta-analysis of the existing literature, we find that treating mental health conditions improves labour supply, measures of attention and focus on work among people with mental health conditions across 29 trials.
We are studying if Work-Related Cognitive Behavioural Therapy improves productivity at work.

3. The design of programs to provide income support. Some recent work shows:

An aspirations and planning intervention encouraging rural women to set goals, break them into small steps and plan for potential obstacles increases aspirations, labour supply, investment, revenue, and wealth and is highly cost-effective relative to a cash transfer in Kenya (accepted at ReStud).
Combining the aspirations and planning workshop with a cash transfer improves women's economic empowerment and reduces rates of IPV relative to the cash transfer alone.

More details are on the 'work in progress' page.

Information on my policy advisory role with the South African Presidency is here.

Media pieces on social protection and behavioural messaging during COVID19 are here.

I lead the Mind and Behaviour Research Group, a joint initiative of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and the Oxford Department of Psychiatry, hosted by the Blavatnik School. This is a network of economists, psychiatrists and psychologists applying psychology to inform the design of programmes which either reduce poverty or improve governance and service delivery in low- and middle-income countries. One of the group's aims is to develop and test scalable, high-impact interventions that can be used in programming and to support governments and NGOs in taking interventions to scale.

We hosted the Linkages between Micro and Macro in Labour Economics in Developing Countries workshop from 13-15 September 2022 in Oxford.

We hosted the BREAD conference on Behavioural Economics and Development from 5-7 February 2020 in Oxford.

We hosted a master class and workshop on Meta-analysis in Development Economics in July 2019. Videos and slides from all speakers are available on the site.