Bio
Núria Rodríguez-Planas is Professor of Economics at City University of New York (CUNY), Queens College, and Doctoral Faculty at The Graduate Center at CUNY. In 2023, she received a 5-year ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million Euros from the European Research Council to lead the project "The Causal Effect of Motherhood, Gender Norms, and Cash Transfers to Women on Intimate Partner Violence (WomEmpower)." Since 2024, she is Distinguished Researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2022, she was named Russell Sage Foundation Scholar. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Economics of the Household and was the managing editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Policy from 2012 to 2023. During the academic years 2020 to 2022, she was Research Scholar at Barnard College at Columbia University. Prior to moving to New York, she was Research Fellow at IZA in Bonn from 2012 to 2015; Visiting Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra from 2012 to 2013; Assistant Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from 2004 to 2012; and Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics from 2007 to 2012. She has also held positions in Washington DC as an Economist at Mathematica Policy Research from 2000 to 2004, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1998 to 2000, and the Brookings Institution from 1997 to 1998. She received her Ph.D. in Economics in 1999 from Boston University.
Her research is mostly distributed across three broad highly policy-relevant topics: (1) Policies, Institutions, and Social Justice in Labor Economics and Human Capital Development; (2) Social Norms and Behavioral Decisions; and (3) Public Health Issues.
Rodríguez-Planas’ most influential paper is “Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Learning Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the United States.” This single-author paper, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in 2012, analyzes the Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP thereafter), an intensive (5 year) and comprehensive randomly designed program in the late 1990s aimed at low-performing students from low-performing US high schools. The paper underscores the importance of measuring long-term impacts when evaluating educational interventions, as it finds that the positive effects of QOP faded away within two years and that the program’s effect on employment five years after the end of the intervention, when enrollees were in their mid-twenties, was negligible. In a follow-up paper, Rodríguez-Planas finds that QOP was successful in persistently improving the high-school and post-secondary educational outcomes for ex-ante high-risk students (that is, youths in the top half of the predicted-drug use distribution), and also their employment and wages when they were in their mid-twenties, 10 years after random assignment. However, the lack of any QOP effects on curbing these youths’ risky behaviors while they were in their late teens hides beneficial results for those with ex-ante bad peers (for which QOP was very effective), and detrimental effects for those with ex-ante good peers, as other treated youths during QOP group activities may have been a bad influence for these ex-ante good peers .
Rodríguez-Planas’ work within this line of research is ongoing as she is currently PI in the evaluation of two alternative but complementary randomly designed interventions aimed at improving educational outcomes for low-income college students by 1) reducing financially induced stressors (through the Chancellor’s Emergency Relief grant program, a one-time $500 lottery-based grant targeted to CUNY undocumented and low-income students and offered at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic) or 2) boosting students’ coping mechanisms (through local-assets resilience-thinking training targeted to all CUNY students during the academic year 2021-22). The outcomes of these studies will be highly salient for the CUNY student and academic community. For work related to this project, she recently received a $170,000 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and additional $40,000 from CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant.
Rodríguez-Planas’ second major line of research focuses on showing that gender differences in cognitive development and engagement in risky behaviors are socially constructed. Importantly, Rodríguez-Planas’ contribution to the literature has been to show empirically that gender norms not only impact women’s behavior but also that of men as societies become less traditional and so traditional gender roles are relaxed for both men and women. Furthermore, by using alternative identification strategies and data sources from a variety of countries, she is strengthening the empirical evidence on the relevance of gender norms for behavioral decisions. Altogether, these scholarly contributions build a rich body of evidence that shows the relevance of social norms and broadens our understanding of factors behind cognitive development, engagement in risky behaviors, or intimate partner violence victimization, which is an important first step in designing policies aimed at improving cognitive development and preventing risky behaviors and domestic violence.
Rodríguez-Planas has also addressed pressing public well-being policy issues, especially for low-income and disadvantaged individuals related to employment. Using individual panel administrative data from the Spanish Social Security Records, she was among the first to explain most (71%) of the motherhood earnings gap between first-time mothers and childless women, and to estimate event studies around the birth of the first child, comparing the earnings trajectories of mothers versus childless women. In another important contribution, she shows that a well-intended policy that allows parents with young children to reduce their working hours backfired as it aggravates labor market inequalities between men and women, since there is a very gendered take-up, with only women typically requesting part-time work.
According to RePEC, Rodríguez-Planas is ranked in the top 6% of all economists according to the number of distinct works, weighted by the number of authors and recursive impact factor, the top 1.5% of all economists in the last 10 years, the top 3% of all women economists, and the top 1% of all women economists of the last 10 years. She is also ranked in the top 10% of all economists in the sub-field of gender economics. According to IZA, she ranks in the top 1% of IZA Discussion Paper authors (81 among 10,477 authors) based on Discussion Paper production and downloads. As of April 23, 2023, her scholarly research has received 3,401 google citations (2,102 since 2018). Her h-index is 29 and her i10-index is 41 (22 and 33 since 2018).
As Principal Investigator, she has received grants from the European Research Council, Russell Sage Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, BBVA, IZA, CUNY Interdisciplinary Research, PSC-CUNY, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs, and Equal Opportunities, FUNCAS, among others. All together these grants amount to about $3.4 millions (only counting those where she was PI).
She has published in the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among other journals. Much of her work has been written about in The Wilson Quarterly, The New York Times, El País, El Economista, and La Vanguardia, among others, and it has also been covered internationally by radio and television.