Kristiina Huttunen appointed research professor at VATT
Kristiina Huttunen, PhD, specialises in labour economics. Her current fields of interest include the impact of child home care allowances and the consequences that job loss have on the choices of families.
Kristiina Huttunen will join VATT on 1 October as research professor in the Local Public Finance and Provision of Public Services research team. This is a new professorship.
Kristiina Huttunen is versatile researcher of labour economics. Her research covers a broad spectrum of how various economic shocks – such as parental job loss – effects a family’s decisions on whether to have children, for example, or to relocate. In her recent work, she has discovered that children whose parents lost their job during the depression in the 1990s make security-driven choices in education 10–20 years later.
“These children didn’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps as far as career choices go, or choose a profession with a high risk of unemployment,” says Huttunen.
Other areas of her research include the effects that child home care allowances have on mothers’ careers and children’s development, as well as the impact that entry to post-compulsory education has on a young person’s risk of exclusion and criminality.
Kristiina Huttunen completed her doctoral degree in economics at the University of Helsinki in 2005. She comes to VATT from Aalto University’s School of Economics, where she has worked as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow (since 2014) and as post-doctoral researcher (2011-2014).
Huttunen has wide-ranging and diverse international experience. Following her doctoral thesis, she worked as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Economics in Uppsala University and as Visiting Scholar at the Economics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 2016/2017 academic year, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Economics of University College London and CReAM, from where she recently returned to Finland.
Huttunen’s start at VATT coincides with the recent news on the establishment of the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics. Why give economics more resources?
“Modern applied economics is meticulous research, which aims for the very specific identification of cause and effect and also an appreciation of the mechanisms behind them. We have a lot to give to other disciplines too,” says Huttunen.
“Now it’s time to raise the level of economics in Finland to an even higher standard.”
Further information: Kristiina Huttunen, +358 295 519 423 or [email protected]
Kristiina's personal site: https://sites.google.com/site/krhuttunen/
Kristiina Huttunen
Appointments at VATT
Local public finance and provision of public services
Press release
Press release
education and training
education choices
labour economics
labour markets
unemployment
