Maria Guadalupe is an Associate Professor in the Economics and Political Science department at INSEAD. She obtained a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics in 2003. Prior to joining INSEAD, she was an Associate Professor in the Economics and Finance department at Columbia Business School where she held the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Chair in Leadership and Ethics. Maria has also been a visiting scholar at MIT and Princeton and is currently a faculty research fellow at the NBER, and a research affiliate at the CEPR.

She teaches courses on Industrial Organization and Organizational Economics as well as a course on the Brazilian economy. Her research is in the area of Organizational and Personnel Economics. In her work, she has studied how globalization and the competitive environment faced by firms shapes their internal organizational choices, including pay levels, incentives, executive compensation and hierarchical structures. She has also studied the effect of corporate governance arrangements on firm performance. Her more recent work focuses on how multinationals select their foreign targets and the productivity consequences of the changes in firm boundaries. Her research has been published in top economics and finance journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Labor Economics, and American Economic Journal: Applied.

She joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in November 2001 and became a Research Fellow in July 2005.