NERA Economic Consulting Interview: What Is Published

The one sentence NERA Economic Consulting writes on interviews

It sits on the recruiting events page: "We attend career fairs, host recruitment presentations and events and conduct on-campus interviews."

That is the whole of it. On-campus interviews happen. Nothing states how many rounds follow, who runs them, how long they last, or whether a case or a quantitative exercise appears. A firm in the same market does state all of that, since Compass Lexecon prints two stages inside its European postings, with a written case study for analysts.

The same page prints the 2026 to 2027 North American calendar, and it splits the two tracks cleanly. The bachelor's and master's list runs from University of Chicago on 25 August 2026 through Brown on 8 September, Columbia and Barnard on 9 September, Georgetown and Yale on 23 September, to Stanford on 1 October. The PhD list is separate and longer, running from UT Austin on 8 September through Berkeley, Michigan, Minnesota, Boston University, Duke, Johns Hopkins and Columbia, to University of Wisconsin-Madison on 15 October.

Most sessions are labeled virtual, a handful on campus. Two consequences follow for a candidate. Sessions at another school are still worth attending when they are virtual, and the doctoral calendar starts and ends later than the undergraduate one, which changes when your materials need to be ready.

The four searches behind the sentence

Writing that a firm publishes nothing is an easy way to be lazily wrong, so the method belongs on the page.

The reason for step three is worth naming. Many applicant portals return a nearly empty page to a plain fetch, because the posting body arrives later as data. Reading the payload directly is how the deadlines, the salary bands and the document lists on this page were obtained, and it is why a page that only fetched HTML would have concluded, wrongly, that NERA publishes nothing at all.

So the honest statement is narrow. NERA publishes no interview format. It publishes a great deal else, and the difference matters because one of those two claims is checkable in a minute and the other is false.

Two entry routes, two titles, two salary bands

The postings do the work the careers site skips. They name the roles and price them.

Two details deserve their own line. The US researcher posting opens the door to any undergraduate major, which is rare in this corner of the market and worth knowing if your degree is in physics or philosophy. And deposition training appears on the doctoral posting, which tells you what the job builds toward: testimony that holds up under questioning.

The United Kingdom runs differently again. The London summer posting requires that you be "studying Economics," lists Excel, Stata, R and Python among the tools, and asks for four items: "Please submit your CV, cover letter, transcripts, and a writing sample, online directly to this posting." Then it says, in capital letters, that only complete applications will be considered. The US summer posting asks for three items and does not request a writing sample.

What to prepare when NERA publishes no case interview

An unpublished format is not an unprepared interview. The firm describes its work and its people in detail, and both descriptions are actionable.

On the work, the careers page is specific: "You'll take a multidisciplinary approach that includes applying economic theory and your skills in statistics, econometrics, finance, game theory, mathematics, and computer science to the most challenging issues our clients face." The researcher posting turns that into tasks, including building quantitative models, valuation analyses, writing code for complex data analysis, and drafting memos and expert reports.

On the person, the firm writes its own specification: "Succeeding at NERA means you're intellectually curious. You are excited about the real-world challenges you're working on, you love to learn, and you're interested in solving complex problems through analysis and data synthesis." It adds that you "approach problems methodically, paying close attention to detail and developing accurate and objective conclusions."

Three things follow. Bring one quantitative project you can walk through end to end, because every task on that list is one you will be asked to evidence. Be able to say why economic consulting rather than finance or strategy, since the campus sessions exist to draw that line. And practice arithmetic out loud, because the one thing every version of this interview will contain is a number you have to reason about in front of someone.

A regulated tariff question, worked in dollars

NERA publishes no practice case. The numbers below are ours, built in the shape of the energy and regulatory work its own pages describe.

The setup. A distribution utility's allowed revenue is its rate base times the allowed return, plus depreciation, plus operating costs. Rate base is $2.4 billion. The allowed return is 7.5 percent. Depreciation is $120 million a year and operating costs are $260 million. The network delivers 8 billion kilowatt hours to 2.5 million customers.

Move one: build the revenue requirement. The return component is $2.4 billion times 7.5 percent, so $180 million. Add $120 million and $260 million and the allowed revenue is $560 million.

Move two: turn it into a tariff. $560 million across 8 billion kilowatt hours is $0.07 per kilowatt hour, so 7.0 cents.

Move three: apply the regulator's cut. The allowed return drops to 6.25 percent. The return component becomes $2.4 billion times 6.25 percent, so $150 million. Allowed revenue becomes $530 million and the tariff becomes $0.06625, so 6.625 cents.

Move four: say what moved and by how much. The tariff fell by 0.375 cents, which is 5.4 percent of 7.0 cents. The utility loses $30 million a year of allowed revenue.

Now check the sentence against the number, which is where these answers go wrong. The allowed return fell by 1.25 points on 7.5, which is a 16.7 percent cut to the return component. The tariff fell only 5.4 percent, because the return component is $180 million of a $560 million requirement, which is 32.1 percent. And 16.7 percent of 32.1 percent is 5.4 percent, so the two routes agree. Calling this "a 17 percent cut for consumers" would be wrong by a factor of three. Per customer it is 3,200 kilowatt hours a year at 0.375 cents, so about $12 a year.

The four dimensions behind a scored number

NERA publishes no marking scheme, and no economic consultancy we have read does. The hundred points below belong to us. They come from the code that runs our grader, and the firm has never seen them.

What NERA does not publish

Any interview stage. No round count, no duration, no format, no interviewer count. Four search routes, listed above, returned nothing.

Whether a case or a quantitative exercise appears. Unknown. Nobody should tell you otherwise, including us.

Whether doctoral candidates present a job market paper. Two comparable firms publish that they do. NERA does not say.

Any online test or vendor. Nothing we read mentions one.

Deadlines for full-time roles. Only the summer internship carried a date, 12 October 2026. The full-time postings we read carried none.

Pay outside the United States. The London, Berlin and Madrid postings say competitive salary without a figure.

Headcount per intake, acceptance rate or any marking scheme. None of these appears anywhere.

If your invitation email describes a format, that email is current and this page is not. Send us what you saw with the date, and we will read it against the firm's pages before changing a word.

What changed on this NERA page

Errors get their own dated entry here instead of being quietly patched into the text above.

29 September 2026. The previous version, 270 words long, said NERA's screening steps could not be verified and left it there. The conclusion survives, and the page that carried it had not done the work: it had not read the careers pages, the campus calendar or a single posting. A refusal of access is different from an absence of information, and only one of those two was established here.

29 September 2026. The entry titles, the published salary bands, the internship deadline, the split between the US and UK document lists, and the campus calendar are all new. So is the account of how the postings were read, which is the part that makes the negative claim checkable by anyone.

29 September 2026. The four math weights are now named as ours at the point where the chart appears. The previous version presented them as the standard for the role.