Taryn Dinkelman

Taryn Dinkelman is an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in development and labor economics, with a focus on Africa. Her work identifies barriers that prevent workers in developing countries from realizing the full value of their labor. She has studied how labor market and human capital outcomes are affected by inadequate physical infrastructure, poor legal protections, exposure to environmental shocks in early life, and information barriers. Her current projects show that allowing workers to migrate to where their labor is more valuable facilitates structural change in rural labor markets and enhances educational attainment in sending communities. Dinkelman has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2017.

Dinkelman previously held appointments at Dartmouth College and Princeton University and was a visiting fellow at Harvard and Yale universities. She is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); a research affiliate at the International Growth Centre (UGC), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and the South African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU); and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

Her research has appeared in a number of academic journals and other publications.

Dinkelman earned a BA from Rhodes University and a M. Commerce from the University of the Witwatersrand, both in South Africa, and a PhD from the University of Michigan.