Mary Arends-Kuenning is Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, she was a Berelson Post Doctoral Fellow at the Population Council in New York City.

Dr. Arends-Kuenning's research examines economic and demographic issues in developing countries. Her research focuses on child labor and children’s schooling, programs that pay children to attend school, family planning programs, and the transnational migration of health care workers. She has published articles in a variety of journals and books including Demography, World Development, Population and Development Review, Studies in Family Planning and Economics of Education Review. She has experience living and working in Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Brazil, Peru, and South Africa. She has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Population Council.

Current research projects include investigating why children’s schooling improved in the 1990s in Brazil, examining the impact of household structure on children’s schooling and child labor in Latin America, and evaluating the role of foreign-trained doctors and nurses in the U.S. health care system.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in November 2006.