I am an Associate Professor of Management at Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain. After earning a Licentiate degree in Economics from the Autonomous University of Madrid, and thanks to a Bank of Spain scholarship, I pursued my doctoral studies at MIT Economics. My doctoral dissertation was supervised by Professors Bengt R. Holmstrom, Daron Acemoglu and Susan C. Athey.
My research lies at the intersection of industrial relations and personnel economics and focuses on understanding the economic costs and benefits of work and employment practices. From an academic standpoint, my main interest is to contribute to advance in our understanding of the role of economic incentives in the employment relationship, taking into account the internal organizational context where this relationship takes place, in particular the work practices used by the organization.
In a context of increasing competitive pressure, organizations have become more aware of the need to introduce work practices that improve their employees’ incentives. However, in this endeavor they are confronted with numerous questions about how employees should be rewarded (paid/promoted), how jobs should be designed, and how reward policies interact with job design. Answers are not simple because economic incentives can be very powerful, but can also generate large distortions. Moreover, incentive schemes have to take into account that organizations have structural features that may be hard to change.
The developments in information technology and the great amount of detailed employee data that organizations can nowadays have imply that firms have a wider array of options to design their work practices, which makes these questions more pressing. Greater benefits may be obtained thanks to better data, but greater distortions may also be caused. My research has analyzed such costs and benefits both theoretically and empirically, thus contributing to a better understanding of how work practices should be designed.
My work has been published in leading academic journals, including Management Science, The Accounting Review, Production and Operations Management, Industrial Relations or the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.