Economist needed for research project

Hi, We are looking for a strong quantitative researcher to answer: Where do the UK’s olympiad medallists and top technical graduates end up? Nobody can currently answer this. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) graduate outcomes data reports averages, which conceal the right tail entirely. The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset is built on HMRC tax records, so anyone who leaves the UK disappears from it: the people this question most concerns are exactly the people it cannot see. The academic research buries the UK inside global samples, stops at 2010 cohorts, and publishes tables rather than data. We are building the first open, UK-focused dataset of where 500+ of the country’s exceptional young technical people ended up, designed to inform UK government policy. Full brief attached.. Questions the study should answer • When UK talent leaves: after undergrad, at the PhD, or at first job. Each exit point implies a different policy lever • Who returns. Departure and non-return are different problems, and almost nobody measures return flows • Where the stayers go. If retained medallists end up in finance rather than frontier tech, the UK has an allocation problem, not only a retention one • Whether the 2015-2025 cohort behaves differently from earlier ones, given DeepMind and the UK AI ecosystem postdate the existing literature The work • Build the dataset from public sources: olympiad medallists, prize-winners, notable builders • Automate the pipeline, make the data trustworthy • Write findings a policymaker would quote Who we want • A PhD economist, ideally in labour or innovation economics, or a computational social scientist with equivalent proven ability • A builder, not just an analyst: you have personally constructed a dataset from public sources, not only analysed data handed to you • Strong Python, comfortable with web scraping and record linkage • Brings initiative: sees a sharper method or stronger analysis, says so, builds it • Bonus if you read Agarwal and Gaulé’s “Invisible Geniuses”, Yuret’s olympiad career-path studies, or MacroPolo’s Global AI Talent Tracker and thought the UK needed its own version Apply if you have relevant experience.