Research Advisor, International Development Team Permanent: 39 hours per week Salary range: £30,000 - £45,000 per annum, plus benefits Based in Westminster, with occasional international travel

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is looking for an exceptional candidate to join our Home Affairs, Security and International Development team in London as a specialist in research and evaluation.

The successful candidate will focus on our International Development work with a range of developing countries to develop and test behaviourally informed policies to achieve social impact. The successful applicant would support our work in Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala, Indonesia and the Philippines among other countries. The Home Affairs and Security team work on issues as diverse as illicit employment, mobile phone theft, cyber security and increasing the diversity of the police. We currently expect 75% of this role to sit in the international side of the team whilst allowing some work to cross over into the Home Affairs and Security team.

Working with the Policy Lead, they will design, monitor, and evaluate Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs), as well as help develop BIT’s growing econometric and data science function.

The Behavioural Insights Team

The Prime Minister created BIT in 2010 to apply behavioural science to public policy in the UK. In February 2014 we became a social purpose company, owned by the Cabinet Office, Nesta (an innovation charity) and our employees.

The Behavioural Insights Team works with governments around the world in almost every area of government policy. Whilst the subject and output of our projects varies considerably, there are common threads: we try to understand the contexts in which people make decisions; we notice small details; we find out what has and hasn’t worked before; and we measure everything we do as robustly as we can.

BIT selects staff on the basis of cultural fit. All our staff believe passionately in our company values: prioritising social impact; empiricism and humility; fresh thinking, collaboration; and public service. These values are particularly key when working with vulnerable populations in poor settings.

Roles and Responsibilities

BIT’s research team is at the forefront of a revolution in evidence based policy, conducting RCTs in a wide range of policy areas. The successful applicant will support all research activities team within the Home Affairs, Security and International Development team. This primarily involves leading the design of RCTs and their analyses, ensuring the rigour of our trials are kept to the highest possible standard.

Few organisations offer the opportunity to work on as wide a variety of trials as the Behavioural Insights Team, and this is particularly true in the Home Affairs, Security and International Development team. This role will be well suited to a candidate with a strong background in econometrics and trial design and an interest in applying this to policy.

Essential

• A degree (masters or higher) in a relevant subject (such as economics, econometrics or data science), including significant statistics and econometrics;
• Good working knowledge of Stata and/or R (this will be tested);
• Ability to manage a workload of several projects and to deliver to a high standard on deadline;
• Ability to work collaboratively, with a range of stakeholders in delivery, policy and academic fields;
• A good understanding of the behavioural science literature;
• An excellent, intuitive understanding of econometrics and statistics and the ability to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience;
• Experience conducting original research, either using large datasets or conducting experiments in the lab or field (for example as a research assistant or as part of study); and
• Excellent communication skills, including ability to communicate to non-technical and policy audiences.

Desirable

• A PhD or significant research experience in a relevant subject area, including, but not limited to economics; social psychology and econometrics;
• Experience of running RCTs and familiarity with other evaluation methods routinely used in field experiments;
• Experience working with large datasets;
• Experience working in developing countries and foreign language skills, especially Spanish;
• Experience working on Home Affairs and Security projects.