Research Fellow (Econometrics and Validation)

Overview

The Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics and Political Science uses behavioural science and quantitative research to help organisations build more inclusive workplaces. Its Growth and Governance Hub measures and drives progress on race inclusion in large listed companies. The Hub assembled every annual report published by FTSE 350 companies over seven years and built a large expert-calibrated measure of how they write about diversity. Around 20 specialists hand-labelled more than 25,000 passages, and a large language model was tuned until it matched the experts as closely as they matched one another. The model now scores the full corpus, and the first company reports concern race and ethnicity.

The Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science is recruiting a Research Fellow for Econometrics and Validation, reporting to the Director of the initiative. The post is full time and permanent, with funding available for one year starting in autumn 2026.

What you will do

The fellow leads the quantitative validation of the Hub's measures and writes the work up for publication. This means assembling and linking firm-level data from external sources, including financial performance, workforce composition and diversity and governance characteristics, and using panel methods suited to a multi-year corpus to establish how the measures relate to those variables. The fellow tests the construct validity, robustness and stability of the measure and its components, proposes improvements and contributes to peer-reviewed papers and published methodology.

Requirements

Candidates should hold a PhD in economics, econometrics, quantitative social science or a closely related subject, or expect to submit their thesis by the start date. They need a solid background in applied econometrics, particularly panel data methods, a record or trajectory of peer-reviewed publications, demonstrable expertise in diversity and inclusion research with a strong grounding in race and ethnicity in workplace or labour market settings, experience constructing and linking large firm-level datasets, and advanced programming skills in Stata, R or Python.

What you get

The salary is 53,949 to 62,160 GBP per year inclusive of London allowance, with potential to progress to 69,073 GBP. Benefits include an occupational pension scheme, generous annual leave, hybrid working and training opportunities. The post holder is expected to be in the London office at least two days a week.

Key dates

The closing date is 18 October 2026 at 23:59 UK time, and late applications cannot be accepted.