Windfall Trust

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Windfall Trust is hiring a fully remote Scenarios & Modeling Economist to build and own its quantitative modeling capability, acting as the technical authority behind everything the organization publishes — choosing methods, assembling data, writing or directing code, and defending results to external economists, peer reviewers, and government analysts.
The immediate focus is a scenario modeling platform that translates narrative AI futures into quantified economic parameters, propagates them through household microdata, and produces distributional and fiscal results: who loses income, by how much, what it costs the fiscal system, and how policy responses perform under each scenario.
This is a build role — Windfall has no existing modeling infrastructure, so the hire will make foundational methodological choices from scratch, with scope expanding over time to other modeling work (indices, macro shock generators, fiscal costing) as needs evolve.

Responsibilities include designing the platform's economic primitives, mapping shocks onto occupations, simulating and costing policy responses (transfer programs, capital taxation, social insurance), co-authoring publications, and setting standards for reproducibility.

Strong candidates are senior economists with range across quantitative modeling approaches, comfortable defending technical choices externally, with an advanced degree and 5+ years of applied modeling experience.