Research Assistant in Behavioural Economics

About us

The Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) at UCL was founded in October 2014 as part of The Bartlett, UCL’s Faculty of the Built Environment. IGP works towards a prosperous and sustainable global future grounded in fairness and justice. Its research asks what prosperity means to people in different places and develops new ways to measure it, drawing on researchers from across UCL and beyond. IGP works closely with decision-makers, business, civil society, and communities, so that knowledge from outside academia shapes the research.

IGP has research partnerships in the UK, Lebanon, Tanzania, Greece, and other countries. Its UK work includes the East London Longitudinal Study of household prosperity and the Citizen Prosperity Index. IGP’s Productivity Research Programme studies what holds back work, earnings, and productivity in the UK.

The IGP Data Team, led by the Head of Data, carries out IGP’s quantitative research and builds its measures.

About the role

The Research Assistant will build the measures on which the project rests. The post holder will prepare the Understanding Society data, with the administrative and local data linked to it, and construct measures of cognitive load and mental health from existing survey items. They will also help construct and validate the Economic Inactivity Index and the extended SLI. These measures and their code are the base for the project’s econometric analysis and for its work with policy partners.

The project’s central mechanism is behavioural. Stacked insecurities are thought to wear down people’s capacity to work through cognitive overload, disrupted routines, and time diverted to managing insecurity.

The post holder will work within a measurement framework set by the IGP Data Team and test whether the measures behave consistently across population groups and over time. The post holder will also contribute to IGP’s Productivity Research Programme, which draws on the same data, and to the project’s reports, working papers, and journal articles.

About you

We are looking for a researcher trained in behavioural economics or a candidate trained in economics or behavioural science. The right candidate will know the research on scarcity and cognitive load and be able to judge what survey items can and cannot measure.

For full details and personal specification please see the attached Job Specification.

What we offer

As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents we also offer some great benefits, some of which are below:

- 41 Days holiday - pro-rata (including 27 days annual leave 8 bank holiday and 6 closure days)

- Defined benefit career average revalued earnings pension scheme (CARE)

- Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan

- On-Site nursery On-site gym

- Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption pay

- Employee assistance programme: Staff Support Service

- Discounted medical insurance

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

As London’s Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world’s talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong. We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce. These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women. You can read more about our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion here : Equality diversity inclusion