Overview
Kristin F. Butcher is Professor of Economics at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on immigration economics and the intersection of immigration with crime, welfare use, and labor markets. She is best known for her work with Anne Morrison Piehl documenting that immigrants have substantially lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans despite adverse demographic characteristics, and decomposing the mechanisms behind this finding.
Key Contributions / Features
- Immigrant incarceration rates (Butcher and Piehl 2007): Documented the immigrant incarceration puzzle — immigrants have ~1/5 the institutionalization rate of natives despite demographics predicting the opposite — and ruled out deportation as the mechanism, finding instead multidimensional positive selection and general deterrence. See Immigration and Crime.
- Obesity and non-employment (Butcher and Park 2008): Co-authored Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Economic Perspectives article finding that the rise in obesity, combined with age and demographic changes, explains 34–47% of prime-age men's non-employment increase from 1984–85 to 2004–05. The key finding is a stable obesity propensity — the morbidly obese have always had worse outcomes, but the gap relative to normal-weight men has not widened. See Obesity and Non-Employment.
- Earlier work: Butcher and Piehl (1998a, 2000) on immigration and city crime rates; Butcher and Hu (2000) on immigrants' welfare use.
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