(2026 PhD/ABD graduates) Senior Associate (Antitrust & Competition Economics practice)

About Charles River Associates

is a leading global consulting firm that offers economic, financial, and strategic expertise to major law firms, corporations, and governments around the world. Since 1965, CRA experts have combined rigorous cutting-edge research, state-of-the-art methodology, and proven experience to address our clients’ most complex challenges.

CRA's specialises in providing economic advice on matters of competition policy and regulation. We assist firms and their legal advisors in all types of competition proceedings before competition authorities and courts: mergers and acquisitions, abuse of dominance allegations, cartels, restrictive commercial agreements, market investigations, litigation and disputes, intellectual property or state aid. We also provide advice to regulatory authorities in similar matters.

Learn more about our work by reviewing our Services and Industries on our .

Practices seeking to hire candidates with this profile include (hiring locations listed):

• (Brussels, Belgium; London, UK; Dusseldorf and Munich, Germany; Paris, France)

Position Overview

Senior Associates work closely with senior consultants on project teams, and will have the opportunity to immediately work on some of the largest, high profile and most significant competition cases in Europe, playing a key role in shaping the economic analysis and thinking of these cases. Successful candidates have a strong knowledge of economic concepts and a range of research and quantitative skills. A typical Senior Associate would:

• Identify and conceptualise issues, specifying rigorous economic models to analyse market issues and data, undertaking statistical and econometric estimation, and managing the work of research associate staff and colleagues;
• Supervise, train and mentor research associate staff;
• Assist in the development and presentation of client deliverables, including expert reports and white papers summarising opinions, conclusions, and recommendations using market, industry or client-proprietary data;
• Act as a primary point of contact for lawyers and other industry or government clients on a variety of practice-relevant issues;
• Program, build models and/or perform regression analyses in statistical analysis programs (such as Stata, Python, R, SAS, Matlab, and Mathematica), including large data projects requiring use of cloud computing;
• Ensure the integrity and accuracy of analyses and opinions; and
• Contribute to practice-building activities (training, recruiting, publication, expertise sharing, etc.).

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Desired Qualifications

• PhD degree in economics with a completion date of December 2025/Summer 2026 and an academic focus on Applied Microeconomics or Applied Microeconometrics, with specializations like industrial organization, labor, health, behavioural and public economics, or other quantitative areas;
• Experience in Excel, Stata, Python, R, SQL, SAS, ArcGIS/ArcPy, or Cloud computing (Databricks/Spark, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS);
• Demonstrated understanding of, and ability to explain, economic, financial and/or accounting concepts, and quantitative and qualitative analysis methods;
• Curious and analytical thinkers who bring creative approaches to non-standard problems;
• Effective written and oral communication skills;
• Eagerness to learn new skills and programming languages;
• Demonstrated high level of initiative and leadership;
• Strong teamwork and collaboration capabilities;
• Excellent time management and task prioritization skills; and
• Clear and demonstrated interest in consulting through coursework, work experience, activities, or attendance at CRA recruiting events.

As much of our work occurs in our offices, minimal travel is required.