Guaranteed Income Research Fellowship
New York (Remote initially) // Part Time
Overview
The Jain Family Institute (JFI) is seeking a candidate with a strong background in statistics, social scientific methods, and policy design as a research fellow. The research team at JFI is examining the impacts of cash policies on poverty and income distribution. As part of that work, we are developing our capacity to perform microsimulations on existing and hypothetical policy proposals including “universal basic income” and reforms to the child tax credit, the EITC, and SNAP.
JFI seeks a research fellow to support the team in preparing and analyzing federal and state administrative data, modeling policy impacts, and generating reports and visualizations on findings. The research fellow will join a small team of researchers from across the social sciences. The fellow will work closely with our lead researcher and with the Guaranteed Income research team more generally.
Responsibilities
Time commitment: approximately 15-20 hours a week. Because JFI works with potentially sensitive data, the fellow will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement.
The fellow’s tasks will include:
- Merging, cleaning,and preparing datasets for analysis
- Analyzing the poverty and distributional impacts of policy proposals
- Development of enhancements to existing simulations
- Tabling results and creating charts and graphs as needed
- Coauthoring whitepapers and briefs on findings
Required Skills And Qualifications
- MA or greater in economics, statistics, applied mathematics, public policy, sociology or a related discipline
- Experience working with census and other government administrative and survey data (e.g. IPUMS extracts)
- Familiarity with topics including poverty measurement, labor supply response, and consumption determinants
- Strong skills in statistical programming and data manipulation in R. Additional familiarity with Python and with the JSON data format preferred by not required.
- Skill in data visualization preferable
Benefits
- A stipend of $15,000, paid in biweekly installments for six months with the possibility of renewal based on performance and subject to project needs
- The possibility of co-authoring research papers or publishing whitepapers
- Opportunities to meet with leading scholars and policy experts
Commitment
The position will be remote at least until the end of May (though there may be opportunities, if so desired, to work from our Manhattan office on occasion.) During such time, you will need to be present and online during your set working hours, and as needed for research meetings and presentations. Our typical hours are 10am – 6pm ET. Beginning this summer, we may require that fellows work at our office on set dates during the week.
How to Apply
Send all application material to economics@apps.jainfamilyinstitute.org:
- A letter of interest
- A CV
- A coding sample or samples demonstrating proficiency with data manipulation and analysis in R
Preferred deadline: April 15, 2021. Submit materials at your earliest convenience.
ABOUT JFI
JFI is an applied research organization in the social sciences. We work to bring just and equitable research and policy from conception in theory to implementation in society. Our current initiatives include applied research in higher education finance, guaranteed income, and digital ethics.
JFI is firmly committed to the principle of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO). We believe that the quality of our work and research is immensely strengthened by the diversity of our network and our differences in background, culture, experience, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and more. We actively seek and welcome applicants who identify as BIPOC, women, members of the LGBTQIA community, persons with disabilities, and people at the intersections and peripheries of these identities, from across the spectrum of disciplines and methods. For details about our staff and current projects, see http://www.jainfamilyinstitute.org.