Postdoctoral Researcher / Scientific Collaborator: Social Production Satellite Account for Switzerland 80 - 100 %

The University of Zurich, Switzerland's largest university, offers a range of attractive positions in various subject areas and professional fields. With around 10,000 employees and currently 12 professional apprenticeship streams the University offers an inspiring working environment on cutting-edge research and top-class education. Put your talent and skills to work with us. Find out more about UZH as an employer! ###

Your responsibilities

• Aligning the established social production method with European System of Accounts (ESA 2010), adapting how it is applied and reported while preserving the underlying methodology.
• Mapping the social production categories to available SAKE data, assessing coverage, and conducting a gap analysis of categories not yet captured.
• Compiling and analysing the relevant Swiss data sources to produce the pilot account's first estimates.
• Building the account into a working statistical product, documented and reproducible so that it could be updated on a regular cycle by Switzerland and/or other nations wishing to adopt the approach.
• Co-authoring research and policy outputs, including a joint report on social production in Switzerland.
• Preparing a methodological report setting out options to extend category coverage, with recommendations for Switzerland and a generalisable approach that other national statistical offices could follow.
• Applying the resulting social production measures to examine productive contribution across the lifecourse, with particular attention to the contributions of older people and the implications for healthy longevity and measures of demographic dependency.
• Working in person within the National Accounts Division and liaising across FSO units to resolve questions of definition, derivation, and method.
• Maintaining reproducible workflows and documentation consistent with official statistics standards.
• Designing and teaching of two seminars per year (one per semester) at UZH Department of Psychology on interdisciplinary topics bridging economics and aging research.

Your profile

Essential:

• A degree in economics at undergraduate or postgraduate level.
• Strong quantitative analytical skills and demonstrated ability to analyse and interpret economic, survey or official statistical data.
• A good understanding of macroeconomic measurement and national accounting concepts, with the ability to interpret and apply statistical and accounting conventions.
• An interest in economic and social measurement, including the measurement of non-market production and/or social metrics.
• A translational research orientation, comfortable working across an academic research team and a national statistical office and communicating with policy audiences.
• Strong written communication skills and the ability to produce clear, rigorous analytical and technical reports.
• Fluency in English.

Desirable:

• Familiarity with the System of National Accounts (SNA) and/or European System of Accounts (ESA), including experience with or knowledge of satellite accounting.
• An interest in the application of economic and social measurement to healthy longevity, demographic change, the care economy, fiscal sustainability, and the intersection of market and non-market production.
• Experience with time-use surveys or unpaid-work modules in labour force surveys.
• Experience working with survey microdata or other official statistical data.
• Experience with time-series, price or index methods, including constant-price adjustment.
• Experience working in or with a statistical office or national accounts setting.
• Proficiency in statistical software such as R, Stata, Python or equivalent.
• A record of peer-reviewed publication and technical reporting.
• Working proficiency in German or French.

What we offer:

• The opportunity to build the first social production satellite account established within a national statistical office, an innovation in national accounting with international reach.
• A role embedded in official statistics while contributing to frontier research, with training in the social production accounting method from the University of Sydney's Mental Wealth Initiative.
• Support through co-supervision across the three partners and connection to an international research and policy network spanning ageing, health, and economic measurement.
• Employment on University of Zurich terms, with salary set according to UZH and Canton of Zurich guidelines for postdoctoral researchers.
• A clearly defined three-year horizon to deliver a programme of work with direct policy relevance.

Working arrangement and independence:

The position is employed and funded by the University of Zurich Healthy Longevity Centre. Working time is divided between the FSO National Accounts Division in Neuchâtel, where the day-to-day work sits, and the UZH Centre for Healthy Longevity, with research supervision shared between the partners under a light joint-oversight arrangement. The teaching activities will be delivered on site at UZH. A clear separation is maintained between FSO-hosted research and official statistics, and no output carries the FSO's name without its approval. The underlying method is published and open.