It is 2001, and Türkiye’s financial system is in freefall with imminent bank closures on the horizon Among those charged with closing banks’ doors is 22-year-old Turkish economist Berkay Özcan, working with Arthur Andersen, then one of the world’s biggest consultancy firms.
“I remember visiting banks where people were crying at their desks,” he says. “They knew what was coming. We were there to end their jobs, their livelihoods.”
That experience stayed with him — not as a lesson in finance, but in fragility. The collapse, he realised, wasn’t just about numbers; it was about the families behind them. Years later, that understanding would become the foundation of his academic life: studying how policies, laws, and welfare systems shape the choices and chances of ordinary people.
After two years in finance, Özcan left Istanbul for Barcelona, earning his MSc in Economics and later his PhD in Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he studied under the influential Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen.
“I didn’t even know who he was,” Özcan recalls. “He hired me because I could code, then told me I’d be writing my dissertation on family policy.”
Under Esping-Andersen’s mentorship, Özcan began to see economics differently. Behind every dataset was a human story: parents deciding whether to have another child, couples staying or separating, women weighing the cost of returning to work. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I realised that behind every economic trend there are families and children whose lives are shaped by policy.”
Over the next two decades, that insight became his compass. A social demographer by training, Özcan’s work bridges economics, sociology, and public policy, examining how institutions influence family formation, fertility, and inequality. His research has been published in American Economic Review, Demography, The Journal of Human Resources, The European Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociological Science, and PNAS, where his statistical models have deepened understanding of how welfare design affects family stability and gender equity.
His studies have shown how divorce and custody laws alter women’s economic outcomes, how childcare policies and unemployment benefits affect fertility rates, and how parental leave provisions influence long-term labour participation.
Policy can look technical, but it defines how people live. It determines whether a woman can afford to return to work, whether a couple can have another child, whether someone is protected after divorce. These things decide the rhythm of a society.
Before joining NYU Abu Dhabi as a Professor of Social Research and Public Policy in 2024, Özcan was a Professor of Social and Public Policy and Co-Director of the Women in Social and Public Policy Research Hub at the London School of Economics. He has also held visiting researcher positions at Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Essex, and was a post-doctoral visiting researcher at Yale for three years. Today, he remains an external Research Fellow at University College London’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM). His work has informed reports for the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, the European Investment Bank, Public Health England, the UK Ministry of Justice, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which is due to launch in November 2025.
Now based in Abu Dhabi, Özcan views the Gulf as a region poised for progress, following demographic patterns long observed in Europe. “Fertility is falling, populations are ageing, and societies are evolving quickly,” he says. “The region has an opportunity to build systems that anticipate these shifts rather than react to them — to make change before a crisis makes it necessary.”
Outside the university, he and his wife are raising two daughters — a grounding influence, he says, that keeps his work connected to everyday life. “It’s a place that values family,” he says. “That perspective matters when your work is about how societies care for their people.”
Two decades on from those shuttered banks in Istanbul, Özcan’s work still revolves around resilience — how societies absorb shocks, recover, and rebuild. “Economics tells you how markets work,” he says. “But policy tells you how people live within them. That’s the part I care about.”
