Junior Specialist/Assistant Specialist - Business & Public Policy - Haas School of Business

The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley is seeking individuals for the positions of either a Junior or Assistant Specialists. The position assists in research in behavioral economics and finance, intersecting with topics in applied microeconomics, macro-finance, labor, and health. The Business and Public Policy group focuses on the applied economics of the functioning and failures of markets and governments, seeking to understand the business of the state and the way the state affects business.

Our core themes involve political institutions, public policy, norms and values, the law, and the many private and public governance arrangements that shape societal outcomes. The candidate would work at the Haas School of Business under the supervision of BPP faculty in one of the two research areas: Area 1: Applied microeconomics focusing on environmental and energy economics, with links to public finance, industrial organization, international trade, political economy, development, and health.

Projects examine the effectiveness and distributional incidence of air and water pollution regulation, energy policy, and climate policy, using administrative, remote-sensing, and field-based survey datasets. The candidate would work under the supervision of Professors Kelsey Jack, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, Joseph Shapiro, and/or Reed Walker Area 2: Applied microeconomics focusing on political economy, economic history and organizational economics.

The candidate would work at the Haas School of Business under the supervision of Business & Public Policy Associate Professor Guo Xu. General Duties: Develop and Execute Data Workflows: Clean complex datasets, identify and resolve technical coding issues, and monitor statistical deliverables to ensure rigorous quality assurance.

(20% time) Implement Econometric Analyses: Write efficient, collaborative, and replicable code to maintain datasets and execute analyses using reduced-form (DiD, RD, IV) and structural econometrics (MLE, GMM, dynamic programming). (20% time) Support Research Design: Assist in the design and interpretation of causal inference models, collaborating with the research team and external experts to refine ongoing project analyses.

(20% time) Manage Project Documentation: Maintain accurate, transparent documentation of all data processing and analytical steps to ensure research replicability. (20% time) Contribute to Scholarly Output: Prepare research manuscripts and project reports, including the generation of publication-quality tables and graphical visualizations of results.

(20% time)