VPS Research Assistant Consultant

The IDB Group is a community of diverse, versatile, and passionate people who come together on a journey to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our people find purpose and do what they love in an inclusive, collaborative, agile, and rewarding environment.

About this position:

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean face challenges of coverage, adequacy, and sustainability of pension programs. These problems arise from rapidly aging, informality, and, in some cases, relatively generous benefits. 

In developed countries, there have been significant reforms to pensions and regulations relating to older workers. These policy changes have been accompanied by non-trivial increases in the labor supply of the elderly over the same period. This trend has occurred in multiple countries, raising the question of whether the policy reforms have caused the increases in labor supply. It is, therefore, a topic that has attracted significant attention from policymakers and researchers.

Much less is known about labor supply of older worker sin in low and middle-income countries despite the fact the aging transition is occurring much faster in non-high income countries. 

VPS is developing a research agenda that will cover three topics (i) the evidence on how employment rates among the elderly have changed in developed and developing countries over recent decades and the main factors that are thought to influence older workers’ labor supply (ii) understand whether policy reforms have been significant for explaining changes in employment in Latin America and the Caribbean, exploiting significant changes in pension design and (iii) understand the impact of pension reform in access to pension benefits, poverty, inequality and overall fiscal sustainability of pension systems. 

The Research Fellow program offers selected candidates the opportunity to provide support in the development of VPS’ research work, including organizing and analyzing databases, elaborating descriptive statistics, and suggesting ways of performing estimations. The Research Fellow will also help prepare the working papers or other publications, presentations, and different research-related activities, as needed.

The program is open to citizens from IDB member countries who are under 33 years of age as of April, 2024 (or 38 years of age for the diversity groups defined in the Bank’s Young Professionals Diversity Program) and have a graduate degree from a recognized university or accredited institution.

What you’ll do:

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