Traineeship in the Prices and Costs Division in Frankfurt am Main bei The European Central Bank

The Prices and Costs Division monitors, analyses and forecasts inflation in the euro area as a whole as well as in individual countries and sectors, and examines its cyclical and structural drivers. It also assesses inflationary pressures stemming from the external environment and domestic wage and profit developments, as well as the associated prospects, risks and uncertainties. The Division provides input into internal decision-making and policy processes and external communications on inflation, as well as enhancing data to better measure and understand wage and price-setting dynamics in the euro area.

You will join the Division’s Data team, where you will work closely with our experienced economists and will contribute to preparing presentations, conducting empirical analyses and enhancing analytical tools.

The ECB is an inclusive employer and we strive to reflect the diversity of the population we serve. We encourage you to apply irrespective of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or other characteristics.

As a trainee, you will:

• contribute to the Division’s regular internal and external products (including the Economic Bulletin and macroeconomic projections), for instance by preparing tables and charts for reports or PowerPoint presentations, in collaboration with other business areas;
• process, consolidate and transform datasets, and maintain and develop databases and visualisation tools, in order to monitor inflation and real economic developments, also using microdata;
• conduct empirical analyses using data analytics and statistical and econometric tools to support policymaking bodies;
• contribute to enhancing analytical, econometric and forecasting tools;
• support the analysis of wage and price inflation, for example by (i) contributing to the further development of the ECB’s wage tracker (building on micro-level data on wage agreements) and/or (ii) helping to analyse price-setting, working with large datasets based on different sources (including web scraping).

This position offers you excellent opportunities to enhance your quantitative and programming skills, work on analytical tasks and collaborate with experienced central bank economists. It is also a unique opportunity to gain insight into a central bank’s analysis and policymaking, which will be of great value in your future career. You will be part of a multicultural team that strives for continuous innovation to make a positive impact on the lives of European citizens.

Essential:

• a bachelor’s degree or higher in economics, statistics, econometrics, mathematics, data science or a related field;
• practical experience of working with complex datasets, including experience of preparing charts and tables for reports and presentations, and ensuring the quality of data;
• practical experience of statistical and econometric analysis using programming languages such as MATLAB, R, Python, SQL and VBA for Excel and/or statistical and econometric software such as EViews and Stata;
• a good knowledge of the MS Office package, particularly Excel and PowerPoint;
• an advanced (C1) command of English and an intermediate (B1) command of at least one other official language of the EU, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Desired:

• a master’s degree in economics, statistics, econometrics, mathematics, data science or another relevant field;
• a broad knowledge of macroeconomics;
• a solid background in econometrics (in particular, time series econometrics, panel data econometrics and microeconometrics) or statistics and data science (e.g. web scraping, text analysis or machine learning);
• practical experience of working with microdata;
• practical experience of working with relational databases using SQL and/or big data analytics tools in Hadoop, Spark or similar big data frameworks;
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