Predoctoral Research Fellow

Description of Organization

The Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences is seeking a Predoctoral Research Fellow to join its team.

Description of Position

The Predoctoral Research Fellow will provide analytical research support to a portfolio of studies conducted through the Center for Economic and Social Research at USC, which is working with Yale University on a body of applied microeconomic research projects on women’s access to digital technology in India and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Reporting to USC’s Dr. Simone Schaner, Associate Professor (Research) of Economics, the Fellow will support Dr. Schaner and other researchers, along with Fellows and staff at Yale University and Inclusion Economics India, to design, pilot, test, and potentially scale promising interventions designed to empower women and digital actors and ensure digital public infrastructure and other digital policy is gender intentional. Strong candidates will have sound data and analytical skills and training in economics and applied econometrics. Successful candidates should be able to interact effectively with teams across different cultures and time zones, engage effectively with counterparts at all levels, support field activities with both implementation and data inputs, and support Dr. Schaner’s work more broadly. The Fellow will be based at USC, with travel to India and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Responsibilities

• Working directly with Global South-based counterparts, support formative piloting work through contributing to questionnaires, developing appropriate protocols and quality checks, and participating in scoping activities to determine appropriate design of proposed studies
• Contribute to institutional human subjects (IRB) proposals and modifications, ensuring protocols proposed are appropriate and applied
• Scrape, process, and clean large administrative datasets from public websites
• Clean and process secondary datasets (e.g., household surveys) for analysis
• Participate in survey design and data collection activities, including designing and coding questionnaires and related forms for digital data collection, and setting up and running data quality checks for large-scale data collection activities
• Prepare appropriate documentation and guidelines for all data and field-related activities
• Contribute to pre-analysis plans, papers, and other written material, upon request
• Prepare literature reviews per request of senior researchers
• Draft policy briefs and presentations, presenting research evidence in a compelling and policy-forward format, and effectively representing the research to external stakeholders
• Contribute to regular reports and presentations for donor audiences
• Coordinate with project teams to ensure timely submission of deliverables, as well as provide support to field staff as necessary 
• Other duties, as required

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors or Master’s degree in economics or a related field
• Proven analytical skills and proficiency in Stata or R (Stata preferred)
• Solid understanding of randomized controlled trials and program evaluation
• Strong interest in public policy and economic development
• Excellent oral and written English skills
• Proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite
• Mature, self-directed, with the ability to multitask and meet deadlines

Desired Qualifications

• Advanced coursework in econometrics
• Basic skills in Python
• Experience living or working in India or Sub-Saharan Africa; knowledge of an Indian language or Swahili an asset
• Data collection and field research experience
• Knowledge of poverty and gender issues