Pre-Doctoral Research Opportunities

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) is seeking to hire a full-time Research Professional to work for Professor Steve Cicala on ongoing and new research projects related to energy, the economy, and pollution. It is possible to begin work immediately, and application must be available to work full-time by 1 July 2020 at the latest.

The Research Professional will be a key contributor to advanced empirical projects on the relationship between electricity and economic activity, and pollution from power plants. Specific activities include writing web scrapers in Python to compile electricity consumption data from online platforms, programs to pull and process raster images, basic geocoding, data management, website platform design, and database management & processing via Amazon Web Services. For examples of previous work, visit https://home.uchicago.edu/~scicala/papers/papers.html.The RP will work in close contact with the Principal Investigator. The location of work is flexible during these unusual times–the RP may choose their preferred place of work through September. When normal workplace activities resume, the RP will be located at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA and/or Tufts University. Previous members of the team moved on to graduate studies in top-US institutions, including UC Berkeley.

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) is seeking a Research Professional to work on new and ongoing development economics research projects connected to BFI-China and Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management.

In November of 2018, Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago announced the formation of a Joint Research Center for Economics and Finance (the Joint Center). The Joint Center is led by the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management (SEM) and the Becker Friedman Institute. Aiming to both produce and disseminate frontier research on the Chinese economy and Chinese economic policy issues, the Joint Center has developed a robust process for motivating and investing in new, collaborative research jointly led by faculty at both universities over the past years.

The Research Professional will provide academic support to frontier economic research through the Joint Center. The Joint Center released its inaugural Call for Proposals in late 2019, and it has to date resulted in a total of 10 new economics research projects led by faculty at both Universities. These research projects cover a wide range of topics, from the U.S.-China trade war to China’s housing market, environmental economics, the commercial banking sector, and even the reform of judicial system. The detailed list of projects is available at the bottom of this job posting.

The Research Professional is expected to work closely with BFI faculty members and provide research assistance for BFI-China funded research projects, as well as receive mentoring. Occasionally, the Research Professional is also expected to perform some administrative duties in cooperation with the Senior Research Professional.

In addition to providing academic support to BFI-China funded projects, the Research Professional will also engage in the intellectual environment of the University of Chicago through workshops, presentations, seminars, and collaboration with faculty and other researchers. The position will provide excellent preparation for PhD programs.

The Research Professional will report to Professor Zhiguo He, the Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance at Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. The salary will be competitive.

To apply, a resume/CV, cover letter, writing sample, and two reference letters are required.

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) is seeking to hire a full-time Research Professional to work for Professors Pietro Tebaldi and Alexander Torgovitzky on ongoing and new research projects related to applied econometrics, industrial organization, and health economics. Applicants must be available to begin work in July 2020.

The Research Professional will be a key contributor to advanced empirical projects within three main areas: applied econometrics, industrial organization, and health economics; specific activities include demand estimation, numerical optimization, data management, data summary, website platform design, compilation of research reports, and revision of presentations and manuscripts. Typical projects combine economic models with the novel econometric techniques to analyze the impact of different policies in the US healthcare markets. For examples of previous work by this team, visit www.pietrotebaldi.com or https://a-torgovitsky.github.io/ . Importantly, one of our main goals for 2020-2021 is to develop R packages to automate the execution of the estimator developed in Tebaldi, Torgovitsky, Yang (http://www.nber.org/papers/w25827 ). The RP will work in close contact with other members of the team and of the BFI research community and the University of Chicago as a whole. Previous members of the team moved on to graduate studies in top-US institutions, including Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania, and UC Berkeley.

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) is seeking to hire a full-time Research Professional to work for Professors Yana Gallen and Dmitri Koustas. The goal is to support and collaborate on a series of new research projects on gender, health, the gig economy, and their intersection. New directions for our research will explore how work choices are motivated by factors such as health care availability and access, changing worker needs around life events such as childbirth, and gender differences in career choice of undergraduate students. The ideal candidate will support this research by cleaning and prepping data, analyzing the data using econometric models, aiding in field experiments, and preparing presentations and manuscripts. Applicants must be available to begin work in September 2020. Note: This position is based in Chicago.

Due to data access restrictions, candidates for this project must be U.S. citizens and the position offer will be provisional on passing a government background check.