Professors Daniel Schneider (Harvard Kennedy School) and David Weil (Brandeis University) are recruiting one full-time postdoctoral research fellow with a PhD in sociology, economics, public policy, industrial relations, or a related field for the 2024-2025 Academic Year. The post-doctoral fellow will contribute to a research project focused on strategic enforcement in the United States.
This position is based at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, MA. The appointment term is for one year with the potential for a second-year renewal contingent on performance.
This is a hybrid position based on our campus in Cambridge, MA. As a campus-based institution, we place a high value on the in-person experience, cross-team collaboration, and strong community building in order to create a vibrant campus for our students, faculty, staff, and research fellows. The position is required to work in-person on campus a minimum of three days per week during the academic year.
The Malcolm Wiener Center is a vibrant intellectual community of faculty, Master’s and PhD students, researchers, fellows, and administrative staff whose mission is to address pressing public policy questions through academic research, teaching and policy outreach. The work of the Center covers the domains of health care, human services, criminal justice, labor markets, education and political and economic inequality. The Wiener Center addresses pressing questions in these areas by carrying out research on important public policy issues, educating the next generation of academics and policy scholars, and ensuring that research and education are closely tied to and draw from policy and practice.
The post-doctoral fellow will be responsible for working closely with Professors Schneider and Weil on a project focused on developing new tools that could help state labor enforcement agencies more strategically deploy scarce investigative and compliance enforcement resources. The post-doctoral fellow will work with Schneider and Weil to leverage data from the Shift Project merged with rich administrative data to construct predictive models to identify sectors, firms and establishments where workers are at high risk of wage theft, violation of paid-sick leave protections, inadequate breaktime, and inadequate advance notice of scheduling. They will contribute to the development of a proof-of-concept tool for a target low-wage industry and work with collaborating state labor enforcement agencies to field test the methods. In all, this work will involve significant data construction, computational analysis, managing relationships with non-academic collaborators, and contributing to co-authored presentations and papers.
The post-doctoral fellow would work closely with the PIs as well as with other team members including graduate and undergraduate students, pre-doctoral fellows, and research staff and participate in regular team convenings and frequent meetings. The post-doctoral fellow would receive both hands-on training through the planned research work and also additional professional and research mentorship from Professors Schneider and Weil. The post-doctoral fellow would be encouraged to co-author with Schneider and Weil as well as maintain an ongoing program of independent research.
Send an email to shiftproject@hks.harvard.edu with the subject line “Strategic Enforcement Project Post-Doctoral Fellow Application” followed by your first and last name (e.g., “Strategic Enforcement Project Fellow Application – Jane Doe”).
Attach the following documents as a single PDF:
