Intern, Demand Impact Modeling

About the team you are joining IATA is committed to achieving net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. In the Sustainability and Economics Division, we take a holistic approach to this challenge and seek to combine subject matter expertise with a cross-functional approach to leverage on all knowledge within the team to facilitate environmental and financial sustainability of the airline industry. The Industry Analysis team conducts research about the airline industry and produces key forecasts regarding passenger and cargo volumes, as well as airlines’ financial performance. The team is also responsible for producing ad-hoc analysis, maintaining regular publications, and producing and delivering presentations in support of the Senior Vice President Sustainability and Chief Economist and IATA’s internal and external stakeholders. What your day would be like You will work as an integral member of the Industry Analysis team within the Sustainability and Economics Division, performing research regarding the empirical price impact on air travel demand. You will support advancing a research project that estimates demand elasticities at various granularity levels, using IATA’s unique air travel demand and price data. Your work will contribute across all stages of the research cycle of the project: from literature review, data preparation, and econometric modeling, to robustness testing, and final documentation. Your work will directly feed into publishable research outputs for a key flagship report by IATA Sustainability and Economics, with scope for meaningful intellectual contributions to the methodology, and to the findings. The role is expected to include, but not be limited to, the following aspects: • Conduct a structured literature review spanning transport, energy, trade, and tourism economics to compare price elasticity estimation methods, instrument validity, and demand modeling best practices; • Estimate price elasticities of air travel demand at various levels using basic panel econometric methods (e.g., OLS, fixed effects), working within an established econometric modeling framework; • Design and implement robustness and sensitivity checks, sub-sample analysis, and model diagnostics to stress-test key elasticity estimates; • Produce well-documented, reproducible code in R hosted on Bitbucket, and write clear analytical memos and a final project report summarizing methodology, results, and limitations; • Present interim findings to the project team, contribute to internal knowledge-sharing, and support the preparation of results for external publication or stakeholder communication.