Department
The Centre for Microsimulation and Policy Analysis (CeMPA) is hosted at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), a flagship department within the University of Essex, internationally recognised for excellence and expertise in quantitative social science and research methodologies. CeMPA is at the frontier of microsimulation modelling, with applications to tax-benefit analysis, life-course analysis, and complexity economics.
CeMPA’s research is critical to understanding the social distribution of life chances, through the analysis of the mechanisms that explain the entrenchment of social and health inequalities over time, and the short-, medium- and long-term effects of policies.
CeMPA’s research on distributional issues, from tax and benefit systems to family, gender, health, wellbeing, and population change, is focused around two tools developed over the years and offered open source to the scientific community, with a wide range of models and applications: the static tax-benefit microsimulation platform EUROMOD, now jointly developed with the European Commission, and the dynamic microsimulation platform JAS-mine. Together, they cover all areas in social science microsimulation, from tax-benefit to dynamic microsimulation and agent-based modelling.
Duties of the Role
The successful candidate will help develop the microsimulation models maintained at CeMPA, with a specific focus on the dynamic framework SimPaths. Key areas of interest, in addition to computational modelling, are distributional issues (economic and health inequalities, socio-economic determinants of health), the economics of ageing, social policy (ex-ante and ex-post evaluation, macro-challenges to the welfare state), and life course analysis (including intergenerational redistribution).
You may also help to produce research outputs for publication and disseminate the result of research and scholarship through appropriate activities inside and outside academia, such as participating in relevant national and international conferences and engagement events. In addition, you will have the opportunity to co-author papers and contribute to the development of the CeMPA research agenda.
A full list of duties and responsibilities can be found within the job pack.
Qualifications and Skills required
A relevant degree in Economics, Computer Science, Physics, Maths, Life sciences, or other Social Science disciplines with a significant computational component or equivalent professional experience or practice is essential. Higher qualifications are desirable.
A full list of applicant requirements can be found under the Person Specification section within the job pack.
This is a fixed-term, full-time research post for two years in the first instance in line with the grant funding.
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