Kathleen Beegle is Research Manager and Lead Economist in the Human Development Team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. Her research experience includes the study of poverty, labor, economic shocks, and methodological studies on household survey data collection in developing countries. She has expertise in the design and implementation of household surveys and their use for poverty and policy analysis.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, World Bank Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, and Demography. She is co-author of numerous chapters in books and is co-lead of several World Bank reports including Realizing the Full Potential of Safety Nets in Africa, Poverty in A Rising Africa, Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa, and the World Development Report 2013 on Jobs.

She was previously in the Research Group from 2001-2013. In the interim, she was the Lead Economist with the Gender Group (2018-2021), the Human Development Program Leader for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, based in Accra, Ghana (2014-2018), and a Lead Economist in the Africa Chief Economist Office (2013-2014). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University and competed a post-doctoral fellowship at RAND.