European Central Bank

Traineeships in the Euro Area External Sector and Euro Adoption Division

The position:

You will join the Euro Area External Sector and Euro Adoption Division in the Directorate General Economic Developments. In our division, we monitor, analyse and forecast macroeconomic developments in EU countries outside the euro area, as well as euro area countries in central and eastern Europe, and develop tools for this purpose. We also carry out studies looking at trade, the balance of payments, the international investment position and price/non-price competitiveness in the euro area and other EU countries.

In your role as a trainee, you will:

• contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of analytical, econometric and forecasting tools used for the analysis of trade, the balance of payments and country-level economic developments;
• access public and commercial databases;
• process, consolidate and transform datasets, and maintain and develop databases, in order to monitor economic developments, potentially involving the use of microdata;
• conduct empirical analysis using databases, Excel and econometric software;
• contribute to the ECB’s Economic Bulletin and other regular internal and external publications (e.g. by preparing tables and charts), in cooperation with other business areas.

Qualifications, experience and skills

Essential:

• A bachelor’s degree in economics or a related field;
• experience with one or more of the following types of economic data: macroeconomic data, financial market data, firm-level data and other microdata;
• a sound understanding of the economic issues covered by the division, as well as the institutional framework of the ECB and the Eurosystem;
• an advanced command of English and an intermediate command of at least one other official language of the EU;
• a working knowledge, with proven experience, of statistical and econometric packages such as Stata, R, MATLAB and EViews, or expert knowledge of other programming languages;
• knowledge of numerical methods used in economics. 

Desired:

• A master’s degree in economics or a related field;
• experience of using market data services such as Bloomberg, Datastream or Haver Analytics;
• experience with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), particularly for Excel;
• experience of building and maintaining databases, including relational databases and NoSQL databases, and making databases interact with external sources (e.g. via web APIs);
• experience of web-scraping;
• a solid background in econometrics and/or statistics (especially time series econometrics, panel data econometrics and microeconometrics).

You are curious and eager to learn, and want to further develop your ability to analyse complex information. You are keen to collaborate with others, pursue team goals and learn from other people’s diverse perspectives. You strive to know and anticipate stakeholder needs, and will signal any need for change and propose alternative solutions. 

The recruitment process for this position may include telephone or Skype interviews.

Closing date for application:

8 May 2018 

For more information and for applying, check the official website of ECB:https://www.ecb.europa.eu/careers/vacancies/html/vacancydetails.en.html?id=005056853E201EE890ADFAA8A1A856EE