Traineeship at European Central Bank

You will be part of either the Monetary Policy Research Division or the Senior Management team in the Directorate General Research. Our Directorate General provides research-based policy analysis for the ECB’s decision-making bodies. We conduct and coordinate economic research on issues relating to monetary policy, financial stability and ECB Banking Supervision. We use state-of-the-art dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and econometric techniques, analyse price dynamics using microdata and employ rich household-level data sources such as monthly survey data on the perceptions and expectations of euro area consumers about the economy to research heterogeneity in the monetary policy transmission.

In your role as Student Research Assistant Trainee, you will be part of a team responsible for compiling and analysing cross-sectional, time-series and panel datasets and helping to solve and estimate linear and non-linear general equilibrium models, working closely with researchers from all research areas on a regular basis. Depending on your area of expertise, you will be assigned to one of three main areas:

Macroeconomic models
Activities include: developing, solving and estimating general equilibrium models using perturbation or global methods and contributing to analysis on topics such as the effects of standard and non-standard monetary policy, the interactions between monetary policy and fiscal policy, the nexus between monetary policy, financial stability and macroprudential policy, the implications of climate change for monetary policy, the redistributive effects of monetary policy and the macroeconomic effects of pandemics.

Time series
Activities include: maintaining and further developing existing tools, such as structural vector autoregressions, unobserved component models and non-linear time series models; contributing to empirical analysis on topics such as the transmission of monetary policy, financial shocks and inflation dynamics; and creating and maintaining databases of quarterly, monthly, daily or high-frequency data from Bloomberg, Refinitiv Eikon, Datastream, the ECB’s Statistical Data Warehouse, Federal Reserve Economic Data and Refinitiv Tick History.

Micro panel data
Activities include: working with parametric and semi/non-parametric panel data models such as random/(high-dimensional) fixed effects models, difference-in-differences, matching models, quantile regression, partial identification, classification techniques, machine learning and web-scraping; creating and linking datasets; querying and maintaining high and low-frequency databases derived from commercial and Eurosystem datasets; handling and analysing large, high-frequency contract-level financial data, supervisory bank data and new survey data; and analysing microdata on topics such as monetary policy transmission, heterogeneity, the credit channel, labour market dynamics or consumer expectations.