I have a degree (specialising in Economic Analysis and Quantitative Economics; Special Award, 1993) and a PhD (Special Award, 1998) in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Alicante and my main lines of research are (a) the delimitation and analysis of functional areas, with special emphasis on local labour markets, and (b) the study of the labour market based on microdata.

My work on the first line began with two stays as a visiting researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (University of Warwick) and has focused on adapting international methods to the Spanish case and developing a new set of regionalisation procedures with an optimisation approach, applied to national and international cases. The results of this line have been published in, among others, Regional Studies, Urban Geography, Papers in Regional Science, Geographical Analysis, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, Expert Systems with Applications, Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, International Journal of Automation and Computation and Spatial Economic Analysis (2018 Regional Studies Association Best Paper Award).

The second line focuses on the analysis of the labour market and in it I have dealt with topics such as commuting, education and wages, overeducation, satisfaction and wage inequality, often in the area of the tourism sector. The results of this work have been published in journals such as Regional Studies, Papers in Regional Science, Transportation, Social Indicators Research, Applied Economic Analysis, Tourism Management, Tourism Economics, Current Issues in Tourism, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly and Tourism Geographies.

Since 2003 I have acted as principal investigator in seven projects funded by successive editions of the Spanish R&D&I Plan. Currently I am co-PI of project “Labour market areas and commuting. New challenges” (PID2020-114896RB-100, AEI, Spanish R&D&I Plan, 2021-2025).

Regarding the transference of research results to public administrations and innovation actions, I have been, among others, principal investigator in two projects funded by the Valencian Institute of Statistics (delimitation of NUTS 4 areas and functional areas for the LFS) and I coordinated (together with Professor Coombes, Newcastle University) a study funded by Eurostat, Study on Comparable Labour Market Areas (https://wayback.archive-it.org/12090/20231228154350/https://cros-legacy.ec.europa.eu/content/study-comparable-labour-market-areas_en), which informed the new policy of the EU and OECD in this field.

I am currently the Director of the Institute of International Economics at the UA and previously I was Vice-Dean of International Relations at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences at the UA for ten years. I am part of the academic commissions of the Master’s Degree in Applied Economics and the PhD in Economics. I am also an elected member of the UA Senate and I represent the university research institutes in the Governing Council of the UA. I have more than twenty-five years of teaching experience and recently received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Docentia-UA Programme.