Manager and Senior Adviser - Microdata Team

Department of the Treasury
Canberra, ACT; Sydney, NSW; Melbourne, Vic - Australia
S: $137,590 - $157,907 per annum

About The Treasury

The Treasury is a respected and influential central economic agency. We provide authoritative advice and analysis to the Australian Government on a broad range of economic, fiscal, structural, financial and tax policy issues. We also monitor global economic conditions to make sure Australia is well placed to respond to emerging trends.

Treasury is seeking high quality applicants, with relevant tertiary qualifications and work experience, interested in contributing to the department's efforts to boost Australia's productivity performance and lift the broader evidence base for public policy. Raising productivity growth is essential to sustain further improvements in living standards, given headwinds from population ageing and the terms of trade normalisation.

Against this background, Treasury's Firming Up Productivity in Australia project is developing and exploiting newly available microdata sources – including matched employee-employer data – to conduct policy-relevant research on the sources of market dynamism and productivity growth in Australia. The team also conducts complementary research on labour market issues – such as the structural drivers of wage growth – with a view to improve the evidence base for public policy.

About the Role

To aid this department-wide initiative, the Treasury is seeking highly motivated empirical micro-economists with strong communication and leadership skills to:

• Conduct, supervise and publish cutting-edge research – using leading econometric techniques and rich datasets – into the drivers of productivity growth and labour market outcomes;

• Analyse the causal impacts of major policies and economic shocks on firms and workers;

• Translate research into a micro foundation for the Australian growth narrative and effectively diffuse the results to influence the public-policy process;

• Identify and develop, in collaboration with others, new microdata sources of value to the research agenda;

• Oversee and manage the work of the team, plan and allocate resources to respond to current and future work priorities;

• Work collaboratively across the department to support and build Treasury's capacity for applied micro-econometrics; and

• Collaborate with domestic research partners and leverage international research networks, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Forum on Productivity.
 
Desirable Qualifications / Experience

The ideal candidate will possess recent applied experience with large microdata sources, leading econometric techniques (e.g. panel data estimation methods, causal identification) and a strong aptitude for STATA or related data analysis packages (e.g. SAS, R).

Relevant tertiary qualification(s) and 8 years work experience in a relevant policy institution is highly desirable. Applicants with experience predominantly in a university or research setting are also encouraged to apply and should demonstrate relevant examples of leadership and people management from that environment. This may include the management of relationships with key stakeholders, junior researchers and grant preparation.

An ability to succinctly convey and communicate the findings from applied research to technical and non-technical audiences is essential; as is an ability to draw aggregate implications from micro-level analyses (i.e. to go from macro-to-micro and back again).

Candidates must demonstrate the ability to collaborate and a commitment to support and build the capabilities of their colleagues in microdata analysis.

Familiarity with productivity estimation, related analytical techniques and the international productivity literature would be an asset but is not essential.

Job summary