University assistant predoctoral Universität Wien

Job description:

The University of Vienna is a community of over 10,000 individuals, including approximately 7,500 academic staff members, who passionately pursue answers to the profound questions that shape our future. Fueled by curiosity and a deep sense of duty, they contribute invaluable insights to research and teaching, enriching our society. Are you inspired and driven by the desire to make a meaningful impact? We are currently seeking a/an

University assistant predoctoral

Conduct research and teach at the University of Vienna, where more than 7,500 academics thrive on curiosity in continuous exploration and help us better understand our world. Does this sound like you? Then join our accomplished team!

Your personal sphere of influence:

The Research Unit Technology and Innovation Management, part of the Department of Accounting, Innovation and Strategy, conducts research covering the emergence, development, and commercialization of new ideas and inventions. We try to better understand how various incentive mechanisms, different forms of organizing as well as characteristics of individuals and organizations and their environment influence their innovation activities. The topics of courses offered are aligned with these research topics and are mostly targeting master students.

The project
We are expanding the Bürokratieindex (Bureaucracy Index) a data-driven measure of the volume of German federal legislation, measured in standard pages of consolidated legal text. The index shows that the body of federal law has grown by more than 60% since 2010, with no legislative period reversing the trend.
The next phase is about breadth. The successful candidate will help extend the data infrastructure along three dimensions:

• Coverage and comparison — EU legislation, building equivalent indices for other countries, so that levels and growth rates can be compared internationally
• Measurement — moving beyond text volume toward indicators that capture what the text actually does such as 
  
  • Restrictiveness indicators: counting binding language — shall, must, may not, is prohibited, is required to — to distinguish obligation-creating text from definitions, transitional provisions and boilerplate
  • Cross-reference network complexity: treating the legal corpus as a citation network between statutes and individual provisions, and using network statistics (degree distributions, path lengths, clustering, community structure, centrality of individual norms) to measure how entangled the body of law has become over time — an approach applied to the US Code and to German federal law, but not yet linked systematically to economic outcomes
  • Amendment churn: how often provisions are changed, and how much of the annual growth is new regulation versus rewriting of existing rules
  • Sectoral incidence: mapping regulatory text to industries so that burden can be matched to firm-level data

The longer-term research agenda asks how regulatory burden interacts with innovation — patenting, firm entry, R&D investment, and technology adoption.

The employment duration is 4 years. Initially limited to 1.5 years, the employment relationship is automatically extended to 4 years if the employer does not terminate it within the first 12 months by submitting a non-extension declaration.

Your future tasks:

You actively participate in research, teaching & administration, which means:

• Build and maintain automated pipelines that collect legal texts from national and EU sources
• Develop and validate the measures above, and test which ones actually predict economic outcomes
• Link regulatory data to firm-, patent- and industry-level datasets
• Conduct empirical analysis and co-author papers for international peer-reviewed journals
• We expect you to finalize your dissertation agreement within 12-18 months.
• You work on the completion of your doctoral thesis
• You hold courses independently within the scope of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement.

This is part of your personality:

• Completed Master's degree or Diploma in economics, management, data science, law, computational social science or a closely related field completed by the start date
• Genuine interest in the intersection of law and economics, and in how regulation shapes innovation
• Strong quantitative and data-management skills; proficiency in R and/or Stata, and SQL
• Experience with web scraping and crawling is highly relevant — a substantial part of the work involves building the data yourself (links to a GitHub profile or a scraping/NLP project you have built are welcome)
• Experience with natural language processing (text classification, embeddings, LLM-based extraction) is a strong plus; familiarity with network analysis is welcome
• Ability to work independently, and excellent written and spoken English (C1 level)

What we offer:

Work-life balance: Our employees enjoy flexible working hours and can partially work remotely. 

Supervision by Prof. Stefan Wagner and integration into an active research group.

Good public transport connections: Your workplace is easily accessible by public transport.

Internal further training & Coaching: Funding for conference travel, data and computing resources, and the opportunity to deepen your skills on an ongoing basis.  There are over 600 courses to choose from – free of charge.

Fair salary: Employment under the University of Vienna collective bargaining agreement, including social insurance, with a basic salary of EUR 3.776,10 (on a full-time basis) increases if we can credit professional experience.

Work on a novel, publicly visible dataset with considerable impact.

It is that easy to apply:

• With your scientific curriculum vitae (see Guidelines)
• Motivation letter (see Guidelines)
• Master's Degree  /  Diploma
• Master's transcripts
• Via our  job portal/ Apply now -  button

If you have any questions, please contact:

Stefan Wagner  

stefan.wagner@univie.ac.at

We look forward to new personalities in our team! 
The University of Vienna has an anti-discriminatory employment policy and attaches great importance to equal opportunities, the advancement of women and diversity. We lay special emphasis on increasing the number of women in senior and in academic positions among the academic and general university staff and therefore expressly encourage qualified women to apply. Given equal qualifications, preference will be given to female candidates.

University of Vienna. Space for personalities. Since 1365.

Data protection
​Application deadline: 11/08/2026 

Apply now