Applicants will be part of the Stress Test Modelling Division in the Directorate General Macroprudential Policy and Financial Stability. ECB’s Directorate General has approximately 100 members of staff providing analysis and policy advice on issues relating to macroprudential policies, financial stability, financial regulation and financial stability arrangements. Moreover, in their Division we conduct model-based analyses for stress tests of the financial sector and macroprudential policy impact assessments at national, euro area as well as EU level.

Benefits

The trainee grant is €1,070 per month plus an accommodation allowance.

Roles

As a trainee, applicants will be entrusted with tasks in one or more of the following areas:

• supporting the regular work of the Division, including activities related to EU-wide stress tests and the top-down, model-based part of the quality assurance process;
• Also, supporting the regular model-based macroprudential analyses carried out in the Division;
• contributing, through data collection and research assistance (including code programming), to specific analytical projects, such as the development of models and tools for the top-down stress test as well as macroprudential policy analysis;
• contributing to the maintenance, updating and further development of databases for stress test and macroprudential policy analysis, which may include developing user visualization tools, programming efficient data adjustment procedures, and facilitating user access to complex data sets.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

Essential:

• a bachelor’s degree or higher in economics, finance, statistics, business administration (with a focus on accounting), mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science or a related discipline;
• a sound knowledge of advanced statistical and economic methods, including macro-econometrics, panel data econometrics, micro-econometrics, and/or large semi-structural or DSGE models, and/or financial economics, industrial organisation with a focus on banking, computational economics and/or an advanced knowledge of numerical techniques;
• a sound knowledge of at least one programming language or econometric software package (e.g. MATLAB, R, Stata, C++, Python, VBA and/or Dynare);
• an advanced command of English and an intermediate command of at least one other official language of the EU.

Desired:

• knowledge of stress-testing models;
• experience of working with banking and other financial data, including experience of using bank-level datasets and/or services such as Bloomberg, Datastream, SNL Financial and Thomson Reuters, and/or knowledge of corporate or bank accounting;
• experience of working with official financial sector statistics (e.g. from the ECB, Eurostat or the Bank for International Settlements) and macroeconomic datasets.