Research Fellow

Saïd Business School seeks to recruit either a Pre-doctoral (Grade 6) or Post-doctoral (Grade 7) Researcher to work within the Oxford Future of Finance and Technology Initiative, which is launching a pioneering research programme on “Enabling consumers to make healthy financial choices“, focusing on how behavioural finance insights can be applied at scale through technology platforms to improve financial literacy and decision-making.

This post is for the financial economics strand examining how investors make decisions in digital trading environments. The researcher will work directly with Capital.com, one of the world's leading trading platforms with millions of users, gaining unprecedented access to proprietary data to conduct frontier research. The project encompasses multiple research methodologies and approaches:

• Leverage rich observational data to understand trading patterns, investor heterogeneity, and decision-making dynamics using state-of-the-art econometric techniques
• Identify and exploit quasi-experimental variation to establish causal relationships using instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, and regression discontinuity designs
• Build theoretical models of investor behaviour, market microstructure, and platform economics to generate testable predictions and policy insights
• Develop and estimate structural models of trading behaviour to understand deep parameters and conduct counterfactual analysis
• Document systematic biases and heuristics in financial decision-making, potentially designing and testing interventions when appropriate
• Apply modern ML techniques to predict investor behaviour and identify patterns in high-dimensional data

The research will bridge academic rigor with practical relevance, creating win-win solutions that advance scientific knowledge while providing actionable insights for improving investor outcomes. Please review the Job Description document by clicking the 'Apply' button above to review the essential and desirable selection criteria for this role, as well as the duties of the post. If you would like to apply, click on the 'Apply' button on the ‘Job Details’ page and follow the on-screen instructions to register as a new user or log-in if you have applied previously. Please provide details of two / three referees and indicate whether we can contact them now.   

All applicants must submit their materials as a single PDF file with your name in the filename (e.g., “Surname_Firstname_Pre-doctoral_Application.pdf”, or “Surname_Firstname_Post-doctoral_Application.pdf”)

Application deadline: Friday 30th  January 2026, 12:00 GMT (midday)

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