Kim Lehrer is a research officer at the Centre for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford. Her current research is under the program ‘Transforming economic policies towards the poor’, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

She is a development economist with research interests in education and labour issues in developing countries. Her research focuses on microeconomic aspects of development and uses panel data, field experiments, natural experiments, and experimental evidence to investigate and test hypotheses about economic behaviour.

She is currently engaged in a multi-topic research project studying education and the school-to-work transition in Ghana (joint with Christopher Ksoll (University of Ottawa)) .  As part of this research, her job market paper investigates peer group learning in senior high schools in Ghana using a framed-field experiment.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her dissertation investigates men and women's labour force participation and children's education and health outcomes using original data collected in Ugandan Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camps in 2005 and 2007. The random nature of the conflict and mass displacement in the region is exploited to identify their impacts on behaviour. Furthermore, a randomized trial of two alternative food for education programs implemented by the World Food Programme in the IDP camps is evaluated. The impacts of the programs on school participation, cognitive development, and learning achievement are investigated.

Her research areas are development economics, labour economics, the economics of education, and applied microeconometrics.