Professor Vall Castello is an applied economist, who has specialized in econometric and quantitative methods analysis. Her experience is concentrated both in the academic and public sector world working as a researcher, teacher and project coordinator.

Her current research concentrates on the impact of Social Policy and Pensions systems on labor market decisions, particularly in the Spanish context. She has also studied the effects of labor promotion measures for disabled workers.

As researcher, she was part of two projects at the University of Cambridge and she has also worked on several European Union projects in the fields of social protection, economic and financial integration, culture and education. She has also taught in universities in Spain, The Netherlands and Mexico.

She was a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the European PhD on Social Protection Policy at Maastricht University and has spent research visiting periods at the Institute for Economic and Social Research of the University of Essex, at the Toulouse School of Economics and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a Fulbright-Schuman grant. She defended her PhD (July 2010) at Maastricht University and was awarded a one-year Robert Solow Postdoctoral Fellowship at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Barcelona and a researcher at the Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) and at the Centre for Research in Economics and Health (Pompeu Fabra University).

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in January 2012.