"Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Urban and Housing Economics (Prof. Diamond)"

Position Description

Professor Rebecca Diamond is hiring full-time predoctoral fellows to start in the summer of 2026. The predoctoral fellow will work with large, administrative datasets to study research topics related to housing, urban, and labor economics.

Examples of fellows' current work include analyzing a variety of housing policies such as land-use zoning rules, housing vouchers, public housing, and inclusionary zoning. The work studies how these policies impact households' housing and location choices, as well as housing developers' decisions to build new housing. The work will combine reduced-form casual inference techniques with structural estimation methods to evaluate and improve housing policy in the US. Prior projects that pre-docs have been involved in include studying the effects of housing foreclosure on homeowners, renters, and landlords, quantifying spatial differences in consumption inequality across US cities, and estimating differences in the rate-of-return on housing investments across racial groups.

Fellows are encouraged to participate in broader activities at Harvard, including seminars and courses. Most previous fellows enroll in top economics PhD programs after completing the two-year predoc. Salary and benefits are competitive with other top predoctoral fellowships.

Basic Qualifications

Prior background in some core economics classes, programming skills, and statistics/econometrics is desired. A major in economics is not required. Prior experience working as a research assistant doing empirical work in economics is strongly preferred.

Special Instructions

Requirements: 1. CV 2. Transcripts 3. Recommendation Letters

Contact Information

Shree M econacademicappointments@fas.harvard.edu