Emanuela Cardia studied at the London School of Economics and earned her PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

She is a Full Professor in the Department of Economics. She has directed the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative (CIREQ) since 1999.

Her research mainly concerns understanding the origins of cyclical economic fluctuations in industrialized countries and the effects of policies.

His fields of research are language policies and intergovernmental financial relations in Canada and around the world (New Zealand and Europe; twelve countries from Bhutan to Tunisia, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Morocco and Pakistan).

In public economics, he is interested in federalism (distribution of powers, funding mechanisms) and taxation (costs of collection, harmonization, local taxation, state-owned corporations). In language economics, he deals with income gaps and the impact of language policies, while in human resources, he is interested in social policies from a federal point of view and in the return on investment of education.