Dr Britta Augsburg

What first attracted you to the IFS? 

The people, and their attitude towards the work they do. IFS is not really a place where you can survive if you don’t love what you do. People care deeply about the issues they work on, and about finding credible and robust answers to the questions they address. That combination of intellectual curiosity, rigour and genuine enthusiasm for the work was hugely attractive to me.

Which projects are you working on at the moment? 

A broad theme running through my research is understanding how the environments in which children grow up shape their development and later outcomes, and what we can do to improve those environments.

A lot of my work is in lower-income countries. At the moment, I’m particularly excited about projects looking at whether – and how – effective interventions can be successfully implemented at scale. This includes work on reducing maternal mortality and on improving play-based learning and parental engagement in kindergarten. We work closely with governments and NGOs, and it is particularly rewarding to see the evidence feeding directly into their decision-making. At the same time, findings from one project often generate the questions for the next, so I’m also developing and raising funds for the next stages of this research, building on the questions our work has left open.

I also work on related questions in the UK, particularly around nutrition and the food environment. This includes looking at how households’ food choices change during pregnancy and whether support during and after pregnancy can help low-income families create healthier food environments at home.

What kind of things do you do during a typical day at work? 

During a typical day, there is quite a lot of switching between topics and meeting rooms. I might be brainstorming the design of an evaluation with collaborators one moment, discussing research results with government counterparts the next, then moving on to people management or some unavoidable admin.

But some of my favourite days are the ones that are less “typical”: when I have enough uninterrupted time to think deeply about a project, write up results, put together a presentation or, ideally, work on a new proposal. 

What do you particularly enjoy about the job? 

Working on a new proposal is actually one of my favourite parts of the job. I love thinking about new research questions and ideas, brainstorming with collaborators about which questions we could – and should – answer, and how best to answer them. At that stage, before all the practical constraints inevitably appear – including the small matter of finding something that creates new knowledge, is genuinely useful for policy, attracts funding and, ideally, is publishable in a top econ journal! – it can feel a little like the sky is the limit.

More broadly, I really value the combination of having the freedom to focus on research that I genuinely care about while being surrounded and supported by brilliant people.

How has your career progressed so far? 

I first joined IFS as a postdoctoral researcher for a year and, during that year, applied for the more typical entry position of Research Economist. Since then, I have progressed to Senior Research Economist and now Associate Director.

But another way of describing my career progression is that I went from being known as the “buffalo girl” to the “toilet girl” (although I probably ought to have graduated to ‘woman’ by now). That probably requires some more explanation! But the story behind it also captures something I really value about a career at IFS: the space to follow interesting questions, including ones that may not initially look like traditional IFS – or even traditional economics – topics, and to build a research agenda around them.

My PhD looked at a microfinance programme in rural India that provided credit to invest in buffaloes as an additional source of income. I continued working on microfinance as a postdoc, before becoming involved in evaluating a programme that provided microcredit to construct toilets. That project became the starting point for building a much broader research agenda around water, sanitation and hygiene – WASH.

At the time, WASH was not really a coordinated field within economics. Researchers were working on related questions, but they were scattered across development, public, environmental and health economics. Together with some fantastic collaborators, I wanted to help bring those researchers together. That has grown into an annual WASH Economics Conference, special issues in the Journal of Development Economics and World Development, and greater recognition of WASH as a research area within economics, including through VoxDevLit’s living literature reviews.

What have you learned from working here?

Where to start? The importance of clustering standard errors. Never underestimate the insights a simple probit regression can provide. Communication can make or break almost everything. And O-ring theory – that the weakest link can matter an awful lot – definitely applies to research production.

More broadly, I’ve learned how much good research depends on the people around you: people who challenge your thinking, spot what you have missed, bring different expertise and make the final piece of work much better than anything you could have produced alone.

How would you describe the working environment? 

Passionate, collaborative, ambitious and intellectually demanding. It is also remarkably horizontal: good ideas matter much more than job titles, and people are generous with their time and expertise.

People work hard and expect a lot from themselves and each other, but the environment is constructive rather than competitive. And, importantly, it’s fun.