home | Kourtney Koebel

Kourtney Koebel

Postdoctoral Fellow

kourtney.koebel@utoronto.ca

kourtney.koebel@insead.edu

Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality
INSEAD (Europe Campus)
Boulevard de Constance, Room EW2.12
Fontainebleau, 77305, France

Welcome!

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality at INSEAD (Europe Campus). In July 2025, I will join the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor.

I am a labour economist and industrial relations scholar with research interests in poverty, gender equality, human capital development and the intersection of tax, social and labour market policies. The bulk of my research uses causal identification strategies to understand how public policies and adverse economic shocks impact the labour market decisions of low-wage workers and mothers, as well as the health and educational outcomes of children. My research has also explored the concept of a guaranteed basic income (GBI) and its potential to reduce poverty and improve economic security in Canada. As an industrial relations scholar, I am particularly interested in low-wage workers, who often lack union representation and therefore have the least bargaining power in the labour market. I am also interested in gender equality in employment outcomes, especially among mothers given the unique challenges they face in balancing child care responsibilities with formal employment.

Recent Work

Working Papers

Koebel, K., & Pohler, D. (2024). The Effect of an Unconditional Government Income Transfer on the Labour Supply of Low-Income Workers. CLEF Working Paper Series, WP #76.

We use administrative tax data to estimate the effect of the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB) on the labour supply of single, low-income workers in Canada. Our analytical approach exploits low knowledge of the program, which has two important implications for our research design and identification strategy. First, low program knowledge allows us to treat WITB as an unconditional income transfer. Second, it generates variation in benefit receipt both between and within eligible tax filers over time. We find that benefit receipt has a robust positive effect on employment for single low-income workers, suggesting the additional income helps workers remain attached to the labour market. We also find that WITB receipt reduces labour supply at the intensive margin of work. The positive extensive margin and negative intensive margin results are consistent with a labour-leisure choice model that incorporates the fixed costs associated with working.

Journal Articles

Koebel, K., & Stabile, M. (2024). Evaluating the effects of the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit: The international comparative context. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, 710(1), 36-56.
· Supplementary Materials

We provide an overview of child benefit programs in high-income countries, particularly in comparison to the 2019 and expanded 2021 U.S. Child Tax Credit (CTC). Most countries included in our review provide child benefits that are more generous than the 2019 (and current) U.S. CTC, aligning more closely to the parameters of the now-expired 2021 expanded CTC. We show that while the expanded U.S. CTC was in effect, the U.S. significantly improved its ranking within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of lowering child poverty rates and the effectiveness of its redistribution system on poverty alleviation. Our cross-country analysis further reveals that the refundable and monthly payment structure of the expanded 2021 CTC was in keeping with prevailing models of child benefits internationally.

Baker, M., Koebel, K., & Stabile, M. (2024). The impact of family tax benefits on children’s health and educational outcomes. American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings, 114, 429–434.
· CEPR Working Paper · Replication Files

We leverage recent income support reforms for families with children in Canada to investigate the impact of child benefits on child health and educational outcomes. Using administrative school data from British Columbia linked to parents' tax files, we find evidence that increased family benefit generosity improved children's mental health, but little evidence of any change in test scores from standardized exams. Our results suggest that most of the mental health effect is concentrated among girls and that relative improvements in mental health were larger among children in higher-income families.

Jones, L., Stabile, M., Koebel, K., & Furzer, J. (2024). The effect of household earnings on child school mental health designations: Evidence from administrative data. Journal of Human Resources, 59, S41-S76.
· CEPR Working Paper · Replication Files

We investigate the impact of household earnings shocks on in-school mental health designations in the context of the Great Recession using propensity score matching and a unique data set of linked administrative educational and tax data. Relative to children who did not experience recessionary earnings losses, the rate of new mental health designations among children with earnings losses was 0.5 percentage points higher (20 percent) during the recession. The effect of experiencing a recessionary earnings loss is persistent and grows, especially among children who experienced the loss when they were aged 10 or younger.

Other Publications

Boadway, R., Corak, M., David, K., Emery, H., Forget, E., Halpenny, C., Koebel, K., Robidoux, B., Simpson, W., & Stevens, H. (2023). A proposal for a guaranteed basic income in Prince Edward Island. .

Koebel, K., & Dhuey, E. (2022). Is there an optimal school starting age?. IZA World of Labor, 247.v2, 1-9.

Is there an optimal school starting age? It depends: older children perform better on standardized tests, but evidence of older school starting ages on long-term outcomes is mixed.