Her research centers on education policy with crossovers into public economics, labor economics, and economic history. Recent and ongoing projects examine the effect of financial aid on college choices, Southern school expenditures in the wake of women’s suffrage, and the conditional black-white wage gap as of 1940. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in regulation and public expenditure analysis. Carruthers is a member of the Association for Education Finance and Policy Board of Directors, an affiliated researcher with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), and she has served as a faculty advisor to several fellows in the Harvard Graduate School of Education Strategic Data Project.