Maria Petrova is ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) and a BSE Affiliated Professor. She is a Research Fellow of CEPR and Research Affiliate of CESifo. She has been a Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and was Research Director at the Center for New Media and Society at the New Economic School, Russia (2012-13).

Professor Petrova is an applied microeconomist whose focus is information economics, political economy, and development. She seeks to understand how information flows affect complex links between economic and political phenomena. Existing works traditionally underestimate the role of information provision in media for different aspects of development, and her research fills this gap. The main question that she addresses in her work is how information affects political, economic, and financial outcomes in different countries. Her recent research is focused on the political economy of traditional and social media, and on the determinants and implications of individual political donations.

Petrova has published in American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others. She is a member of the editorial board of the Review of Economic Studies and a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. She has been elected to the Council of the European Economic Association for the 2019-2023 term.