Ana Rute Cardoso received her Ph.D. in economics in 1997 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She completed her first degree in economics and her Masters at the Lisbon Technical University. Ana's research interests include earnings dispersion, employer behavior, and the impact of labor market institutions and regulations. Her work appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, among others.

She is currently Research Professor at the University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences. She is on leave from the IAE (CSIC) in Barcelona, the Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish National Research Council. From 2002 to 2008 she worked at IZA as a Research Associate and before she was Associate Professor at the University of Minho in Portugal.