Postdoctoral Fellow

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recruits outstanding post-doctoral economists to join our research teams.

IFS is Europe’s leading centre for microeconomic research and is an authoritative commentator on a wide range of policy issues. It is a politically independent registered charity aiming to bridge the gap between academia and the wider public.

The Research Directors of IFS are Imran Rasul, Rachel Griffith and Fabien Postel-Vinay and IFS has a large number of Research Fellows including James Banks, Richard Blundell and Eric French, along with many others.

Postdoctoral fellows will work within a team of researchers at IFS whose direction of research fits with the researcher’s expertise and interests. This will likely include a mix of senior academics and IFS research staff. We will work with successful applicants to secure the best fit for their research interests and strengths and to encourage them to develop these to mutual advantage, with a particular focus on academic publication in top international journals.

Researchers based at IFS have access to a range of datasets, with opportunities to work, for example, on administrative datasets on education, health, and labour markets. These can be for the UK and other European countries in which we have close research collaborations. Researchers will also have the opportunity to engage with work using primary collected data by IFS researchers, often in the context of low-income countries, or rich secondary data, often matched to administrative data.

IFS researchers are not only excellent economists, but are able to think creatively about economics and eventually shape their innovative ideas into research programmes. They are keen to use empirical economic analysis to inform policymaking and to pass on their enthusiasm for economics to others, both inside and outside the Institute.

We welcome applications from students expecting to complete a PhD in 2025.

One and three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship positions are available. The one-year position is across all fields. The three-year position is more focused on labor economics where the successful candidate will spend the majority of their time working on a project led by Professor Suphanit Piyapromdee. The project aims to advance understanding on the sources and consequences of skills mismatch. The project combines randomized controlled trials (RCT), reduced form, and structural modelling techniques to quantify the relative importance of various sources of skills mismatch. The research involves estimating job search models using the panel data collected from the RCT. The Fellow will not be doing any fieldwork nor data collection as this has already been done by the local team in Thailand.

For both Fellowships, applications are open to candidates from the UK and abroad. The post is eligible for a Skilled Worker Visa: IFS will support the application where needed for successful candidates. Any offer of employment is subject to the eligibility to work in the UK.

Job duration: one year and three-year positions

Application process

Applications should be submitted via EconJobMarket. We aim to interview shortlisted candidates at the European Job Market, which will be held virtually in December 2024. Subsequent fly-outs will be arranged in January 2025 for a smaller number of candidates; these may be virtual or in-person, depending on circumstances. Applications are welcome from both candidates who are participating on the full academic job market, and those searching only for a postdoctoral position.

If you have any queries, please email [email protected].