In 2023, her research excellence was further recognized with a prestigious €2.5 million European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2024-2029 ERC-2022 - ADG - SH3) to study the causal factors driving intimate partner violence in high-income countries. Her project entitled “WomEmpower: The Causal Effect of Motherhood, Gender Norms, and Cash Transfers to Women on Intimate Partner Violence” falls under grant agreement No 101096525. The ERC Advanced Grant is one of the most prestigious awards in European research, it is extremely competitive and awarded to individual researchers with a track record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years. This grant, along with other funding, has brought her total research funding as Principal Investigator to $3.5 million USD, with $3.06 million awarded since her promotion to full professor in 2019. That same year she was also selected as a $5 million NIH finalist grant application in fall 2023 for the project entitled "EMPOWERMENT: From Resilience Thinking to Agency: A Randomized Intervention for Resilience Among Low-Income and Minority College Students". The project did not get fund due to NIH lack of funds. 

In 2022, she was awarded the renowned Russell Sage Visiting Scholarship (class of 2023-24). The Russell Sage Visiting Scholar fellowship is one of the preeminent fellowships of its kind within the social sciences.  It is a competitive program with a rigorous selection process that admits scholars who have demonstrated excellence in their fields. The Visiting Scholars program at the Russell Sage Foundation has hosted numerous distinguished scholars over the years, including several CUNY Distinguished Professors.

Dr. Rodríguez-Planas has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles in journals like American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Jounal of Human Resources, or Journal of Public Economics, and she has several book chapters and encyclopedia entries. She also wrote a book on Gender Mainstreaming in the Budget published by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2006, which was a reference for teaching gender budgeting to civil servants in Catalunya, Spain, during the period 2006-2010. Such initiative was breaking new ground as it was not until the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework that the European Commission developed its methodology to measure expenditure relating to gender equality at the program level using a special report on gender mainstreaming in the EU budget, published in May 2021. 

Much of Dr. Rodríguez-Planas' work has been written about in The Wilson Quarterly, The New York Times, El País, El Economista, La Vanguardia, and El Periodico, and covered internationally by radio and television. 

Núria has held visiting positions at The Russell Sage Foundation (2023-2024); Barnard College at Columbia University (2020-2022); and Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica (2012-2013). Before moving to NYC, she was a Research Fellow at IZA (2012-2015); Assistant Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2004-2012); Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (2007-2012); Economist at Mathematica Policy Research (2000-2004), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1998-2000); and Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution (1997-1998). She received her Ph.D. in economics and her MA in Political Economy from Boston University. Her bachelor's degree in economics is from the Universitat de Barcelona. She also holds a bachelor's degree from Juniata College, where she visited for a year as an undergraduate.

Academic Contributions

A key contribution of Dr. Rodríguez-Planas to the literature has been to show that gender differences in cognitive development, home production, job-related activities, and engagement in risky behaviors are socially constructed. Her contribution to the literature has been to show empirically that gender norms impact not only women's behavior but also men's as societies become less traditional and gender roles evolve. Her work, published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Social Sciences & Medicine, has explored the intergenerational transmission of gender norms and their impact on various outcomes including the math gender gap, financial literacy, intimate partner violence, and gender differences in smoking. By employing diverse identification strategies and data sources from multiple countries, Dr. Rodríguez-Planas has strengthened the empirical evidence on the relevance of gender norms for behavioral decisions. In her 2025 article in the Journal of Labor Economics on the long-term effects of co-educational industrial arts and home economics in Japan, she shows that gender norms impact both men’s household home production and women’s labor market attachment narrowing gender gaps in home production and job-related activities.

Her contributions to labor economics are equally noteworthy. Her research on the motherhood earnings gap, published in the Journal of Human Resources, has been widely cited and covered in the press. 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. She has also conducted important work on unemployment benefits, part-time work policies, and the long-term impacts of graduating during a recession, published in journals such as the Journal of Human Resources and the Journal of Public Economics. For example, she has shown 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. This research was covered in The New York Times, TheUpshot article entitled: "When Family Friendly Policies Backfire".

In education economics, Dr. Rodríguez-Planas has made significant contributions through her research on universal childcare, mentoring programs, continuing education, and most recently, the impact of COVID-19 on college academic performance. In her most influential paper entitled “Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Learning Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the United States”, she underscores the importance of measuring long-term impacts when evaluating educational interventions, as she finds that the positive academic outcomes of a 5-year comprehensive group-mentoring high-school program 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. Her work in this area, published in journals like the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Economics of Education Review, and the Journal of Public Economics, has informed policy discussions at the highest levels, including being cited in a U.S. Supreme Court petition by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Rankings 

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 2.4% of all economists in the last 10 years, the top 3% of all women economists, and the top 1% of all women economists in the last 10 years. She is also ranked in the top 10% of all economists in the sub-fields of labor economics and 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 August 18, 2025, her scholarly research has received 4,667 google citations (2,516 since 2019). Her h-index is 31 and her i10-index is 47 (24 and 35 since 2019). 

With a robust publication record in top economics journals, significant research funding, and a growing influence on policy, Dr. Rodríguez-Planas has established herself as a leading voice in economics, bridging academic research and real-world policy implications.