Kristin Butcher is Vice President and Director of Microeconomic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Butcher is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on children and families, immigration, health, criminal justice, labor economics, social mobility, and higher education.
Prior to joining the Chicago Fed, Butcher served as director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, where she was a senior fellow in Economic Studies. She is the inaugural holder of the Marshall I. Goldman Chair in Economics at Wellesley College, where she chaired the economics department for six years.
Butcher previously worked as a senior economist in the Chicago Fed’s Economic Research Department from 2002-2007. She also served as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and held faculty positions at Virginia Tech and Boston College, as well as visiting faculty positions at Princeton and MIT.
Butcher holds a Ph.D and M.A. in economics from Princeton University, an M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. in economics from Wellesley College.
