Evelyn Lehrer, a native of Chile, obtained her PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in 1978. She is currently Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Economics Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Her main fields of research are economic demography and labor economics. She has done work on women’s labor supply behavior, fertility, child-care arrangements, union formation and dissolution, the distribution of family income, and more recently, on issues related to domestic violence. She has also done extensive work on the economics of religion. Using survey data from the United States, she has examined the role of religion in several dimensions of economic and demographic behavior, including education, wages, family size, women’s employment, entry into marriage and cohabitation, and divorce.

Her research has been published in various journals. These include Demography, Journal of Human Resources, Review of Economic Statistics, Journal of Population Economics, Economic Inquiry, Applied Economics, Population and Development Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Social Science Research.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in June 2004.