Born and raised in Dos Hermanas (Sevilla), she received her BA in Economics from the University of Seville, and her PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. She has been a professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 2003. She is also an affiliated professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Germany), and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (CreAM, UCL). She has been a visiting professor at Boston University, Columbia University (New York), UBC (Vancouver), and CREST (Paris). Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journal, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. She is currently an editor of the popular economics blog Nada Es Gratis. She has two children.