The Internship Program
The Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Economics is excited to offer internships for current undergraduate students at our Washington D.C. Headquarters Building. Internships are available during the Fall, Spring, and Summer semesters. Summer internships are full-time in-person. Our Spring and Fall internships can be either full-time or part-time, depending on your academic coursework, and are also in-person.
Interested in opportunities after graduation? Check out the Bureau of Economics’ Statistician Program!
What You Will Do
Interns in the Bureau of Economics gain real-world experience by working alongside PhD economists to protect consumers and promote competition in the US economy. Interns work with economists to support FTC matters, including:
- Providing economic and statistical analysis in support of antitrust investigations, consumer protection cases, and rulemaking.
- Conducting academic research and developing reports on the functioning of markets in the economy.
- Finding, identifying, and importing data from public sources, and processing and organizing data submissions from parties to an investigation.
- Creating graphs, figures, and tables that summarize the results of statistical analyses for Commission memos and reports.
- Writing computer programs to compute market shares and market concentrations, calculate consumer harm from fraudulent or deceptive business practices, estimate diversions between products in a market, calculate consumer harm from a merger, or perform other econometric analyses.
- Supporting economists and investigation case teams during interviews, investigational hearings, and depositions.
- Assisting in the preparation of expert testimony in litigations through the creation of demonstratives, calculation of relevant statistics, and drafting questions for expert examinations.
- Conducting research with economists in support of congressionally mandated studies, or to answer questions that arise during antitrust and consumer protection investigations. Interns also conduct research into broader economics questions related to industrial organization, consumer protection, econometric methods, and applied microeconomics.
- Writing reports memorializing analysis findings to help inform FTC decision-making. Interns also present the results of their analyses to economists, attorneys, senior agency leaders, and to the FTC Commissioners.
Through on-the-job training and experience, our interns develop expertise in software packages such as Stata, R, Python, Microsoft Excel, and other programs. Interns also have the opportunity to attend and participate in economic research seminars, brown-bag staff presentations, and economics conferences hosted by BE.
Recent training opportunities have included courses in data visualization, AI and LLM models, and econometric methods.
Recent interns in the Bureau of Economics have gone onto illustrious next steps in their careers in the private sector, at firms such as Charles River Associates and Boston Consulting Group, and at the FTC Bureau of Economics as Statisticians!
How to Apply
To be eligible for an internship in the FTC’s Bureau of Economics, you must be currently enrolled in an undergraduate program. These internships are unpaid, and are designed for students to receive a stipend or course credit from their home institution. Applicants must be U.S. Citizens or Nationals to be eligible.
The ideal candidate for this position has:
- A strong interest in and intuition for applied microeconomics and econometrics or statistical analysis.
- Proficiency in programming languages widely used in economics, statistics, and/or data science such as Stata, R, or Python.
- Excitement about conducting data analysis on a wide range of datasets in support of consumer protection and competition missions of the FTC.
- Interest and aptitude in working with PhD economists on economics research projects that serve the mission of the FTC.
- A desire to grow and build on skills in data analysis and microeconomics.
- A cover letter that discusses their interest in economics and the FTC while detailing their experience in statistics, econometrics, research, and/or public policy.
To apply for an internship with the FTC’s Bureau of Economics, please send a resume, cover letter, and unofficial transcript to econ_interns@ftc.gov. Please note which semester you are applying for in your email.
Spring 2027 Deadline: October 1st
Future Semesters will be announced here.