Laura Mayoral is a Researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE-CSIC) and a BSE Affiliated Professor. Before joining the Institute, she was Assistant Professor and Ramón y Cajal Felow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. She has also been visiting professor at New York University (Abu Dhabi), the Paris School of Economics, INSEAD (Paris and Singapore), and the Department of Economics of the University of Gothenburg.

Her fields of interest are Political Economy, Applied Econometrics, and Development. Her current research mainly focuses on the study of social conflict and state collapse and its relation with economic and non-economic factors such as income inequality, poverty, ethnicity, climatic conditions, etc. In the past she has also extensively contributed in other areas of economics, such as econometrics and international economics. Her research has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Public Economics, International Economic Review and Science, among others.