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. Her fields of interest are inequality and labor economics. She has been working on topics such as earnings dispersion, employer behavior, and the role of labor market institutions and regulations, from an empirical microeconomic standpoint. She is also interested in the links between higher education and the labor market. 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 Associate Professor of Research (”Investigador Científico”) at IAE (CSIC), the Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish National Research Council, and Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). On leave from 2021 to 2024, she was Research Professor at the University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences. From 2002 to 2008 she worked at IZA as a Research Associate and before she served as Associate Professor at the University of Minho in Portugal.