Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Position
Two Full-time Post-Doctoral Associate positions, available July 2018 for two years

Employer
MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE)

Location
Cambridge, MA

Job Description
The IDE seeks two Postdoctoral Associates:

One position will focus on the “digitization” of business, with emphasis on the managerial practices, complementary investments, organizational design, and competitive dynamics related to the growing collection and use of data by firms. The work will involve collaboration with Professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Kristina McElheran (University of Toronto and IDE), as well as some time for independent research. The position will center on the use of novel US Census Bureau data on these topics and will involve considerable time devoted to working in one of the Census Bureau’s Research Data Centers. Relocation to Cambridge is desirable, but not required.

The other position will work on research projects under the supervision of faculty and other principal investigators. High-level topic areas include: the impact of technological change on skills and wages, emergence of new digital business models, digital transformation of enterprises, mega-scale digital experimentation, social prediction, and others. Our research projects balance rigor and relevance, aiming to produce papers for top academic journals while also informing policy and practice through other contributions.

Requirement
Highly motivated postdoctoral researcher(s) with extensive experience in (1) data processing, data analysis, and econometrics; and (2) familiarity with and interest in the literatures on innovation, organizational economics, and/or business strategy. Must be able to work well with academics and industry executives alike. English language skills (verbal and written) must be strong. PhD in a Management Science or Economics field. For the position with Professors Brynjolfsson and McElheran, Special Sworn Status with the US Census Bureau and familiarity with the Research Data Center computing environment (or be in the process of acquiring such) is a major plus.

Salary
Commensurate with experience, and competitive with similar positions.

To apply
Please send a CV, letter of intent, and research sample to IDE Executive Director David Verrill (dverrill@mit.edu) by December 1, 2017. Select candidates will be interviewed at ICIS, WISE or AEA conferences in December and January. For those not attending any of these conferences, phone interviews will be scheduled in January 2018.

About the MIT Sloan School of Management and Initiative on the Digital Economy
The MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) is a team of internationally recognized thought leaders and researchers examining how people and businesses work, interact, and prosper in a time of rapid digital transformation. Key elements of our work include a robust research (35 projects across four “pillars” of research) and publication agenda; convening for scholars, practitioners, funders, and policymakers focused on the future of work; an Inclusive Innovation Challenge that celebrates organizations doing exemplary work on how to make today's economic gains more "inclusive" and sustained; and public communications via leading national and international media outlets that help to amplify our findings to even broader, non-specialist audiences. This interconnected agenda, which builds on more than a decade of related work at MIT, has enabled the IDE to become – in just three years – a prominent, trusted, and non-partisan source of fact-based research at the center of a large and