Research Economist

About Confusion Capital:

Confusion Capital operates as the treasury management organization for the Reserve ecosystem, providing for operations, grants, research and other public good funding. Reserve is a cryptocurrency project, patiently leading the asset-backed currency revolution. We want money that doesn't inflate like USD, but isn’t volatile like Bitcoin. Our approach is to bundle stocks, bonds, gold, real estate, and more into an index, and use that as money. That’s why we built the Reserve Protocol - to let anyone deploy a token that is issuable and redeemable for a basket of any other tokens. These “RTokens” are a new form of asset-backed currency and the next stage of our vision for a global, secure and stable monetary system. Today, the protocol is best used for bundling DeFi assets together to create yield-bearing USD stablecoins and other composite assets. But as more real world assets are tokenized, the protocol will enable new asset-backed currencies that are mostly or fully independent of fiat money. You can learn more about the vision and the Reserve team here.

About this Role

Confusion Capital, Inc. is seeking a research economist to apply a macro perspective at the intersection of traditional monetary theory and digital currency innovation.

We believe that tokenized financial instruments built on the Reserve Protocol will one day be used as currencies. We need an astute economic researcher to help us answer a key question: what would be the widespread impacts of adoption of such a currency? The research design(s) best suited to answering this question will be yours to determine, but we foresee the need to explore questions such as:

• What would happen to market values of assets once a significant amount of those particular assets was in the basket of an asset-backed currency?
• If a nation started using an RToken as its main currency, would this cause sticky prices?
• What would happen if assets started being traded mainly against the RToken instead of the dollar?
• Would it be a good idea to reduce central banking control of monetary policy? 
• What are the potential pitfalls an RToken would encounter without centralized control?

To answer these questions, we anticipate you’ll need to draw on and combine economic theories both old and new, and use econometric tools to model potential impacts of RToken adoption on worldwide economic and regulatory systems. Success in this role will require you to move fluidly between big picture, hypothetical thinking and concrete consideration of the step-by-step ways RTokens could change global economic systems. You’ll work independently and report to the CEO, but we’d expect you to dedicate time to communicating actionable insights from your research to our team and the Reserve community. Ideally, you would also stay in conversation with the broader economics community as a thought leader at the intersection of digital currency and monetary economics.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in economics or closely related field
• Portfolio of high quality research output (papers, models, presentations, etc.)
• Keen understanding of global economic systems
• Excellent communication skills with prior experience teaching or explaining economic concepts to non-economists
• Specialization or strong interest in areas such as:
• Macroeconomics
• Monetary economics
• Financial stability
• Inflation and price dynamics
• Systemic risk in the financial system
• Banking and regulation
• Experience using econometric software to model the impact of financial system and regulatory developments in the economy and understand dynamic economic relationships
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills
• Ability to conduct research independently, without need for a large team of collaborators or significant technical support
• No prior knowledge of or experience in cryptocurrency or blockchain technology is required for this position - just a willingness to learn!

Benefits:

• Competitive salary + token grant
• Fully remote position
• Opportunity to reimagine the impact of financial instruments for ordinary people