Kirsten Sehnbruch

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a British Academy Global Professor and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Universidad de Chile, Director of the Institute for Public Policy at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile), and a Lecturer at the University of California, at Berkeley.

During 2018, Kirsten was awarded a British Academy Global Professorship to study the conceptualization and the measurement of the quality of employment in developing countries from the perspective of the capability approach. From a theoretical perspective, she examines employment as a missing dimension of the capability approach; empirically, she has established a summary indicator of job quality for 13 Latin American countries, which will be extended to other regions of the Global South going forwards. Learn more about Kirsten's current project. Her work informs social, labour and development policy more broadly as it allows for resources to be targeted at the most vulnerable workers in a labour market.

Kirsten’s articles have been published by The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development and Change, Latin American Perspectives and the International Labour Review. She is the author of the book The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and with Peter Siavelis co-editor of Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990-2010 (Lynne Rienner, 2014). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in Social and Political Sciences in 2004.