Remote position as Junior Economic Consultant at CompNet - Master & PhD students

Job Description:  

The Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) and the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Structural Change and Productivity Department, are looking to hire talented Ph.D. students or Master Students to be part of our exciting effort to extend access to, and further develop, a European Data Infrastructure accessible to researchers and policy makers. A key outcome of your efforts will be to expand the use of the European data infrastructure for use in the research of relevant policy questions.  

As part of our team you will interact with policy makers from the National Productivity Boards, become an expert of the CompNet and the MDI data infrastructures, expand and further develop the existing infrastructure, provide training and facilitate access to the CompNet data infrastructure, help organize meetings, and participate in exciting research projects.  

Your technical work involves building an interface between researchers and databases from national statistical offices, this includes jointly developing syntax and the translation of existing syntax into multiple statistical languages. A key component of your tasks is to collaborate with government economists from European capitals to develop policy relevant projects with the data, and to facilitate the interaction between European capitals.  

As part of this effort you will be part of a team teaching and training economists in the use of cross country data and robust analysis techniques. The interested candidates should have a strong research interest and will be expected to contribute to existing or new research lines as a part of the team. The research will leverage the strengths of the CompNet as well as the confidential micro-data available through National Statistical Institutes (NSI) and can be either country specific or cross-country in nature.  

The job implies a weekly commitment of 20 hours (flexible).

Skills: 

The ideal candidate has  

• strong programming skills and willingness to learn new programming languages  
• experience with statistical software such as R, SAS, STATA (one or all) 
• a background in economics at the Master’s or Ph.D. levels. If Master's degree they should have an interest in pursuing a PhD  
• the ability to work collaboratively - good analytical skills  

 The following is a valued asset if you know how to:  

• use editors  

• write Rscripts, use data.table, Github  

• work with open-source tools (R, Quarto, mermaid)  

• work with firm level and productivity data; also with large datasets. 

What we offer:  

• Work with international researchers on policy relevant topics  
• Interact across a number of top academic outfits, including IWH (Halle), Bocconi University (Milano) and Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam) 
• Work with National Productivity Boards to develop and execute research on relevant policy questions 
• Possibility of doing research with novel and innovative datasets  
• Opportunities to further develop and deepen your own programming skills  
• Work in a collaborative environment using standard development tools (such as github) 
• Competitive salary 
• Remote position with flexible working times  

Please submit your application by July 2nd, 2024 – starting September 1st, 2024 via this form. 

We also hire on an ongoing basis, every 3-6 months and encourage you to apply for a later stage. Please let us know your earliest starting date. 

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