Dr. Burcu Yakut-Çakar is a Labour Economist with extensive work and publications on gender, youth employment, and social protection in Turkey. Her research interests lie in the intersection of social policy and political economy. She has been working on topics such as the economics of social policy, public policy analysis, female employment, gender budgeting, micro-simulation, tax-benefit analysis, poverty and social exclusion, pension reforms, and the labour market from a comparative perspective. She has been involved in collabourative national and international research projects on social policy transformation, poverty and inequality, trajectories of female employment, gender budgeting, social assistance mechanisms, as well as social policies targeting women, and the conceptualisation of well-being.

Between 2004 and 2011, she worked at Bogazici University Social Policy Forum and contributed to several research projects as a researcher. As an associate professor of labour economics, she worked as a full-time faculty member at Kocaeli University and a part-time faculty member at Boğaziçi University Department of Economics between 2012 and 2016. She is a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and the Research Group of Feminist Economists (KEFA). She has published journal articles in Development and Change, Journal of European Social Policy, Social Science and Medicine, and Social Policy and Administration. She has also contributed to several books and research reports published in Turkish and English.

Dr. Yakut-Çakar received her PhD from the Department of Economics, Marmara University, in 2010 after being awarded a short-term visiting fellowship at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex in the UK in 2007 for her PhD project on tax-benefit microsimulation. She received her BA and MA degrees from the Department of Economics, Boğaziçi University.