We are pleased to welcome  Kathryn Edin, Professor of Public Policy and Management in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research focuses on urban poverty and family life, social welfare, public housing, child support, and non-marital childbearing.

Her most recent book (with Paula England), Unmarried Couples with Children, is an analysis of a four-year study of 50 unmarried couples who shared a birth in 2000. Previous books include the results of a six-year ethnographic study in eight Philadelphia neighborhoods, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (with Maria J. Kefalas), and Making Ends Meet: How Low Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work (with Laura Lein). Her next book is tentatively titled Fragile Fatherhood:  What Being a Daddy Means in the Lives of Low Income Unmarried Men (with Timothy Nelson).

Professor Edin’s current projects include a study nested within the interim evaluation of the “Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” an evaluation of the Gautreaux Two housing mobility program in Chicago, and “Investing in Enduring Resources with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),” a study of EITC allocation among low-income households in Boston and Central Illinois.

Edin received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in 1991 and has also taught at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania