Ana Rute Cardoso is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE-CSIC) and an Affiliated Professor of the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). She is also a Fellow of IZA Bonn (Institute for the Study of Labor) in Germany and External Fellow of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration in London, UK (CreAM).

Professor Cardoso’s main research interests are Labor Economics and Inequality. She has been working on topics such as earnings dispersion, employer behavior, and the role of labor market institutions and regulations, from an empirical microeconomic standpoint. She is also interested in the links between higher education and the labor market.

A long-standing characteristic of her research has been to bring the firm to the forefront of the analysis, departing from the literature that assumes that firms are homogeneous. She has documented the role of employer policies in the rise in wage inequality. Joint with co-authors, she modeled empirically employers’ wage-setting behavior, documented how firms find margins of flexibility under minimum wages and collective bargaining, and quantified the impact of sorting across firms and differences in bargaining on the gender pay gap. Her work has contributed to our understanding of how firms and institutions shape workers’ careers and labor market performance.

Cardoso’s work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Human Resources, among others.

She is the Editor of BSE Focus, which offers research-based analysis and commentary from economists and social scientists in the BSE community for a broad but informed audience.

Ana Rute Cardoso holds a PhD in Economics from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.