Tarja Viitanen is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Otago. Her main research interests are in applied labour economics, public sector economics, law and economics, economics of the family and microeconometrics.

Tarja graduated with a degree in Economics and Statistics from the University of Birmingham, and then gained her MA in Econometrics with Distinction from the University of Manchester and PhD from the University of Warwick.

Prior to moving to New Zealand, she has worked at the University of Sheffield, the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE, the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UCD and DIW in Berlin and held a visiting fellowship at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Kent in Canterbury.

She was an IZA Research Fellow from July 2006 until October 2016.