| Academia | Staff hired from academic institutions at postdoc or a higher level of seniority. For candidates who recently completed studies, please choose ‘Recent graduates’ |
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| Agent-based model | A model of the interactions of a group of agents, operating as a complex system |
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| Alternative data | Data from sources that are not official statistics. Examples include data scraped from the web, mobility data and administrative data |
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| API | Application programming interface. An interface designed to allow easy access to data |
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| DSGE model | Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. A structural model governed by theoretical rules and estimated as one complete system |
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| Dynamic factor model | A model that explains the co-movement of a wide range of variables using just a few factors |
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| Economics department | The department primarily responsible for research and policy analysis. May have another name e.g. Research department |
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| Financial block | Some models include a representation of the financial sector, much as they include ‘blocks’ for the household sector, government, etc |
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| Forecast error | A measure of the deviation of actual readings of a variable from forecast. We are requesting the average error across the past 12 months, for forecasts that are looking one quarter ahead. So, if you publish a new forecast every month, what is the average error across all these forecasts |
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| FTE | Full time equivalent. A full-time worker counts as 1, someone on half these hours would be 0.5 |
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| Machine learning | A form of artificial intelligence that fits a model to a set of data and improves automatically with experience |
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| Mean absolute error | A measure of the absolute deviation of a variable’s actual value from a forecast |
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| Policy economist | Economist primarily devoted to policy tasks such as data analysis, preparing forecasts, briefings etc. Duties often overlap with research economists so please feel free to provide approximate figures. |
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| Policy research | Re Q8, this is intended to cover policy-focused research that is set ‘from above’, e.g. by a research director or executive, rather than on the economist’s own initiative |
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| Recent graduate | Staff hired after recently completing academic studies, at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level |
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| Research economist | Economist primarily devoted to research. Duties often overlap with policy economists so please feel free to provide approximate figures. |
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| Research time | Approximate proportion of time allocated to research. If this varies please estimate an average. |
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| Salary | Defined as annual salary converted into US dollars |
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| Semi-structural model | A model that combines some elements of structural models with a closer fit to data. Equations are estimate singularly |
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| Time-series model | A purely data-driven model that extracts a forecast from past values of a variable or variables |
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