Windfall Trust

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Windfall Trust is hiring a fully remote Lead Economist to own its core research products and serve as the technical authority behind everything the organization publishes.

The role covers the full research lifecycle - methodological design, data and analysis, drafting, external review, and defending results to treasuries, central banks, and academic economists. Work spans Windfall's flagship products: the Policy Atlas, an upcoming Preparedness Map (assessing countries' AI economic exposure and absorption capacity), and a Scenarios Lab translating AI futures into distributional and fiscal outcomes.
Responsibilities include designing cross-country index methodology, analyzing labor market resilience, assessing fiscal and welfare system resilience across income levels, costing policy responses, and authoring publications for government and institutional audiences.
Windfall's research infrastructure is young, so the role involves making foundational methodological choices while working directly with the CEO and Director of Research.

Strong candidates are senior economists with a range of expertise across labor economics, development economics, fiscal/welfare policy, or quantitative modeling, comfortable being the most technical person in the room and accountable when external experts push back.
Requirements: an advanced degree, 8+ years of applied research or policy experience, demonstrated senior-level work in at least two relevant fields, and a track record of methodology surviving external scrutiny.