The Eui Has An Open Vacancy for A

**The EUI has an open vacancy for a**

**Research Assistant in the**

**Department of Economics**

**Florence, 13 September 2024**

**Reference: V/RA/ECO/4/2024**

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**Who we are
**The **European University Institute** (EUI) at a glance:

- an **international organisation** set up in 1972;
- a research university focusing exclusively on **postgraduate**, **doctoral** and **post-doctoral studies**, and

advanced research;
- located in the hills overlooking the city of Florence, Italy.

The Institute also hosts the Historical Archives of the European Union.

The EUI’s **Department of Economics **(ECO) brings together scholars from all over Europe in a stimulating
and innovative research environment.
ECO focuses on a wide range of topics in the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics.
ECO runs one of Europe’s leading Ph.D. programmes, a MRes in Economics and brings together scholars
from all over Europe in a stimulating, innovative and outstanding research environment.

**Employment details**

**Contract type **Part-time 50% (15/30, 20 hours/week)

**Length of contract **12 months. Start date 1 November 2024

Academic contracts at the EUI may be further renewed (several times and
conditional to the availability of funds), leading to an extension of the period of
service up to a total of 5 years, including the first contract period.

**Salary indication and **Grade: ASTAC3 step 1
**grade**

The basic net monthly salary after taxes is approximately 1.880 Euro, plus
allowances if applicable.

More information about conditions of employment is available here.***

**Place of work **Florence, Italy

**About the project**

**Project Director **Prof. Alexander Ludwig

**Project details **The research project “Aggregate Effects of the Egg-Freezing Technology and

Policy Implications” is a German Science Foundation (DFG)-funded project, which
runs until 31 October 2026. We will analyse how women make fertility and labor
supply decisions and how these decisions are shaped by, first, expectations, that
is beliefs on fecundity; second, information treatments, that is medical check-ups
that provide information on fecundity; third, the availability of assisted reproductive
technologies (ARTs), that is egg freezing (or, social freezing, EF) and in-vitro
fertilization (IVF). We will model fecundity belief formation, information treatment
and decisions on fertility, labor supply as well as the take-up of ARTs in structural
life-cycle models. Our main question is how information treatment and ARTs
change the aggregate fertility rate in a population of women that are
heterogeneous with regard to their labor productivity and their fertility preferences.
In a second step, we will extend our model by the decisions of firms. This is
motivated by the observations that more and more firms offer EF as a work perk.
Our main question in this extension is to understand better the motives for firms to
offer these contracts, depending on firm and observed worker characteristics, and
what the labor market and aggregate fertility implications of these contracts are.

**Job description **The Research Assistant will provide research assistance to the Director of the
project.

Main tasks include:

- Carrying out independent literature reviews;_ _
- Indepentend academic writing of first drafts of research papers;_ _
- Setting up a “simple” two to three period model of fertility beliefs and

fertility decisions of women with heterogeneous productivity and fertility
preferences;_ _
- Extending the simple model to a multi-period life-cycle model;_ _
- Coding up the simple model and the multi-period model;_ _
- Calibrating the multi-period model to fertility trajectories and elicited

fecundity beliefs in Danish registry data;_ _
- Setting up a model of firms with different elasticities of substitution

between human capital and physical capital to motivate employment of
high skilled women by some firms;_ _
- Carrying out regression analyses to causally identify the effects of

information treatments on fertility decisions;_ _
- Cross-validating the structural model with empirical evidence;_ _
- Carrying out counterfactual policy analysis._ _

**Qualifications and experience**

**Qualifications and Essential**:
**Experience**
- Master of arts or Master of science in Economics;
- Advanced programming skills in Matlab, Python, Fortran and Stata acquired
through previous experience;
- Proven excellent knowledge of the economics literature on life-cycle fertility

and labor supply decisions;
- At least 2 years of demonstrated experience with micro-econometric data

analysis and methods for causal identification;
- Proven experience in developing and solving dynamic life-cycle models with

fertility and labour supply decisions, both analytically and computationally.
**Desirable**:

- Third year PhD student or higher, preferably in Economics.***

**Languages **Excellent knowledge of English, both spoken and written (CEFR lev