Research Fellow (Econometrics and Validation)

LSE is committed to building a diverse, equitable and truly inclusive university

Salary from £53,949 to £62,160 pa inclusive with potential to progress to £69,073 pa inclusive of London allowance

Funding is available to support this position for 1 year, starting Autumn 2026

The Inclusion Initiative (TII) at LSE uses behavioural science and rigorous quantitative research to help organisations build more inclusive workplaces. Its Growth and Governance (G&G) Hub is dedicated to measuring and driving progress on race inclusion in large listed companies.

The Hub has assembled every annual report published by FTSE 350 companies over a seven-year period and built the first large, expert-calibrated measure of how those companies write about diversity. Around 20 diversity and inclusion specialists hand-labelled more than 25,000 passages to create a ground truth; a large language model was then tested against that ground truth and tuned until it matched the experts as closely as the experts matched one another. That model now scores the full corpus, producing a comparable, independently produced measure for every report. The first company reports to be published concern race and ethnicity.

Further information about The Inclusion Initiative is available at www.lse.ac.uk/tii.

Applications are invited for a Research Fellow to lead the quantitative validation of the Hub's measures and to write that work up for publication. You will report to Dr Grace Lordan, Director of TII.

You will assemble and link firm-level data from external sources, including financial performance, workforce composition and diversity, and governance characteristics, and establish the relationship between the Hub's measures and those variables using panel methods appropriate to a multi-year corpus. You will test the construct validity, robustness and stability of the measure and its components, propose improvements, and contribute to peer reviewed papers and published methodology that open the measure to external scrutiny.

Candidates should have:

• a PhD in economics, econometrics, quantitative social science or a closely related subject, or expect to have submitted their PhD thesis by the post start date;
• a solid background in applied econometrics, in particular panel data methods;
• A track record or trajectory of peer-reviewed publications;
• demonstrable expertise in research on diversity and inclusion, including a strong grounding in race and ethnicity in workplace, labour market or organisational settings;
• experience of constructing and linking large firm-level datasets from multiple sources, including firm-level, financial or administrative data, and advanced programming skills in Stata, R and/or Python.

We offer an occupational pension scheme, generous annual leave, hybrid working, and excellent training and development opportunities. The successful candidate is expected to be in the office in London a minimum of two days per week as chosen by the Director.

For further information about the post, please see the how to apply document, job description and the person specification.

To apply for this post, please click the 'Apply' button above. If you have any technical queries with applying on the online system, please use the “contact us” links at the bottom of the LSE Jobs page. Should you have any queries about the role, please email TII@lse.ac.uk  

The closing date for receipt of applications is 18 October 2026 (23:59 UK time). Regrettably, we are unable to accept any late applications.

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