Alicia is a tenured Senior Research Scholar at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Lecturer in Economics (Princeton University). She is is the Director of Graduate Studies at the Office of Population Research and a faculty affiliate at the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Before arriving to Princeton she was a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Economics (University of Illinois Chicago) and a Research Affiliate at the Population Research Center of the University of Chicago. She has previously taught at Ohio State University and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and currently collaborates with the BGSE. A large part of her research focuses on how differences in local labor market institutions and economic conditions are related to fertility and household formation decisions in the OECD (and Latin America). She has also studied the fertility of migrants in particular. Her second main research interest relates to migration topics (i.e.immigrant fertility; the relevance of language, political conditions and welfare provisions among the determinants of migration flows; the wellbeing of child migrants; differential labor market performance of migrants across European countries).

A recipient of fellowships from the University of Chicago-NICHD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Government of Catalonia and the Bank of Spain, her work has been published in the American Economic Review P&P, Journal of Population Economics, Population Studies, Journal of Law Economics and Organization, and International Organization among others. Dr. Adsera holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a M.A. in Political Economy from Boston University.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in June 2004.