Student, Macrofinancial Modelling

About the role#

As part of the Financial Markets Department, the Macrofinancial Modeling and Research (MMR) team supports the Bank’s Monetary Policy function by developing research ideas and producing high-quality research papers. In this role, you will work under the direction of the Director and Principal Economist to process large-scale financial datasets and implement text-as-data methodologies.

What you'll do#

• Clean, structure, and document large-scale earnings call transcript data to build a reusable research dataset.
• Develop and implement text-as-data methods to extract firm-level sentiment and topics, such as business outlook, cost pressures, and employment trends.
• Explore the use of large language models within the Bank’s secure research environment to analyze transcript data.
• Document code, data processes, and analytical outputs to ensure reproducibility and facilitate knowledge transfer within the department.

What you'll need#

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in Statistics or Economics with a strong quantitative focus.
• Strong programming skills in Python, specifically using NLP libraries for tokenization, embeddings, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.
• Experience collecting, organizing, and manipulating large volumes of unstructured text data.
• Familiarity with empirical research workflows, including data validation and clear documentation.
• Ability to adapt methods from academic literature and explain technical findings to non-technical audiences.
• Strong work ethic with the ability to work both independently and collaboratively.
• Nice to have: Experience with Databricks, Apache Spark, earnings call transcripts, firm-level financial data, or LLMs in a research context.

Location & details#

• Location: Ottawa, Ontario (Downtown).
• Term: Winter 2026.
• Schedule: Full-time, 37.5 hours per week.
• Work Modality: Hybrid, with a minimum of 12 days per month required on-site.
• Eligibility: Must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident and eligible to obtain Reliability security clearance.