Research Analysts

The variety of programs I’ve used and projects I’ve worked on have helped broaden my career options. Working with several economists enabled me to reflect on what subfields within economics I have the most enthusiasm for, which has helped me build a unique and specific set of interests in my graduate school applications. The RA program also offers tuition reimbursement to take additional economics and math courses to bolster our applications. I used this opportunity to take Real Analysis at Columbia during my first year, which confirmed my decision to pursue a PhD in economics.

Working with other economists and RAs at the Bank has been one of the most motivating experiences of my career. Never have I been surrounded by individuals who exhibited such a combination of technical prowess and passion for their work as I have at the New York Fed. The friendly environment cultivated at the Bank, where curiosity and questions are encouraged, has enabled me to make exponential leaps in my ability to conduct academic research in just two short years. Working with economists, I have been able to observe every step of the research process: idea generation, statistical modeling, paper drafting and submission—even drafting responses to journal referee reports!

I have benefitted from the collaborative nature of the RAs and their tremendously wide range of knowledge. I am always amazed by how quickly RAs will drop their current task to aid another RA with their questions. During my visit days at PhD programs, my research experience at the New York Fed was brought up numerous times by professors as a major strength of my application. I am extremely grateful to have participated in such a special RA program.

I came into the job thinking that the experience would be more along the lines of a traditional pre-doctoral program, in which you are staffed to one project with one economist and exist more or less in a silo while doing your work. The work I did as an RA, however, was both far more collaborative and far more varied than I had expected.

With one of my economists, I worked on projects at the nexus of climate policy and international macroeconomics, looking at the spillover effects of the green transition. With another, I explored the formal links between banks and non-banks, like mutual funds, and investigated how deposit flows and fund flows corresponded during periods of financial stress. With yet another, I assisted with a project involving the impacts of usury limits on household finances.

All these projects involved working with co-authors both inside and outside of the Bank, as well as some of my fellow RAs (which was perhaps my favorite kind of collaboration!). The wide scope of experiences offered by the RA program allowed me to refine my research interests and broaden my basis of knowledge, which I think will help me immensely in my graduate studies.

In my experience, most RAs don’t know what doing research full-time looks like before they get here—I certainly didn’t. In that sense, the RA program was instrumental in helping me understand whether a career in economic research was something I could envision for myself. I learned a lot about the research process from working on different types of projects, including both shorter-term policy work and long-term research.

For example, in a Liberty Street Economics post that I coauthored with economists Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and Giorgio Topa, we examined drivers of the gap in labor force participation since the start of COVID-19, a topical question given today’s labor market. This project taught me how to use available data to draw timely, policy-relevant conclusions and communicate results to different audiences. In contrast, working on long-term projects taught me how economists iterate on research ideas and fine-tune specifications, how to seek out the right data sources or create new ones when needed, and how to be patient!

Finally, you learn a lot of transferable skills as an RA that are useful regardless of what you choose to do after. In particular, most RAs develop strong programming and data analysis skills, as well as deep institutional knowledge on the topics they worked on. This is certainly helpful for RAs who apply to graduate school, but those qualities are also valuable outside the field and have helped some of my peers find really cool jobs after finishing the RA program.