Dr. Burcu Yakut-Çakar is an Associate Professor of Labour Economics and an independent researcher with extensive experience in labour market analysis, social policy, and inequality. Her work focuses on understanding how labour markets function in practice, how institutional arrangements shape employment outcomes, and how policy choices affect access to decent work across different population groups. She has built a strong profile at the intersection of labour economics, gender, and social policy, with particular attention to employment structures, care systems, informality, and labour market segmentation.

She has led and contributed to a wide range of research, evaluation, and advisory assignments for universities, public institutions, and international organizations. Her professional experience spans employment promotion, labour market formalization, social protection and employment linkages, refugee and migrant inclusion, and gender-responsive budgeting. Across these assignments, she has applied mixed-method approaches—combining quantitative analysis, institutional review, and qualitative fieldwork—to assess labour market dynamics, identify policy gaps, and evaluate the effectiveness of employment-related interventions in complex and often fragile contexts.

A defining feature of her work is a strong focus on labour market change driven by structural transformation and sustainability-oriented policy shifts. She has analysed how sectoral change, environmental and social policy reforms, and the expansion of care- and service-based activities influence employment opportunities, job quality, and workforce participation. This perspective allows her to engage substantively with green employment and emerging forms of work, with careful attention to distributional effects, gender dynamics, and inclusion risks, ensuring that new employment pathways support equitable and sustainable labour market outcomes.

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.