I am an Associate Professor of Management at Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain. I have a PhD degree in Economics from MIT and my research focuses on understanding the economic costs and benefits of human resource management practices. My research lies at the intersection of personnel economics, human resource management, and managerial accounting.
In a context of increasing competitive pressure, organizations have become more aware of the need to design HRM policies 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 HRM policies, which makes these questions more pressing. Greater benefits may be obtained thanks to better data, but greater distortions may also be caused.
My research is interested in analyzing such costs and benefits and testing their empirical relevance, thus helping us improve our understanding of how HRM practices should be designed. My research also intends to provide empirical evidence about the relevance of alternative theories as tools to analyze HRM practices.