Paola Manzini obtained her PhD in 1997 for her dissertation on "Game Theoretic Models of Wage Bargaining". She is currently a Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, which she joined in November 2017. Before then Paola was a Professor at the University of St. Andrews (2009-2017), and at Queen Mary, University of London, which she joined in 1997, after spending a year as a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Exeter. She has worked extensively in the area of bargaining theory and its applications, which include labor economics (wage bargaining), with a special interest in the impact of negotiation protocols and institutions on the bargaining outcome. In the past eight years or so here research interests have moved to the modelling of boundedly rational agents.

Her publication record includes the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, and the Economic Journal.

She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association.
She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in October 2000.