Retirement Security & Social Security Reform

Faculty Supervisors:

Project and Position Description:

This position tackles one of America's most pressing policy challenges: securing retirement for future generations. You'll work approximately half-time on each of two separate projects related to U.S. retirement security that will directly inform national policy debates, collaborating with Yale professors John Geanakoplos and Cormac O'Dea, as well as their collaborators: professors Stephen Zeldes (Columbia), Taha Choukhmane (MIT), and Lawrence Schmidt (UCSD).

Project 1: Social Security Reform
Help answer critical questions: What drove Social Security to the brink of insolvency? How do we fix it fairly? You'll build microsimulation models, analyze historical data back to 1935, and develop evidence-based reform proposals that balance fiscal sustainability with distributional equity.

Project 2: Private Retirement Savings
Analyze a new dataset linking US retirement plan to savings. The data has been generated by bringing together hundreds of millions of pages of regulatory filings and large language models, and it has been linked to tax data. We’ll investigate whether savings incentives actually increase total savings or just shift it between accounts, and we will also explore how retirement wealth affects children's outcomes.

What You'll Do
• Build and maintain large-scale economic datasets
• Develop models in Stata, Python, MATLAB, or R
• Conduct econometric analysis and forecasting
• Contribute to policy recommendations with real-world impact

Requisite Skills and Qualifications:

What You Need
• Bachelor's or Master's in Economics, Finance, or a quantitative field (Math, Statistics, Engineering) with economics coursework
• Programming experience (coding sample required)
• Strong grasp of regression analysis and statistical methods
• Excellent writing skills (writing sample required)
• Preferable: US residency for 3+ years (required for Special Sworn Status to access tax data)

APPLY HERE