Jimena Valdez is a Lecturer at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. Before joining City, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Political Economy at the London School of Economics’ European Institute. She earned her PhD in Government in 2020 from Cornell University.

She studies the organization of capital and labour. Her research focuses on what business and workers want, and how do they get that.

She advances this research in two main agendas. In her book project, What Business Wants: The Politics of Labour Reform in Portugal and Spain, she studies the resistance of business in these two countries to labour market reforms promoted by conservative governments during the Eurozone crisis. In particular, she argues that employers’ associations have been the main obstacle for change in labour policies.

In her other project, Über-State: The Political Economy of Platform Capitalism, she advances a theoretical framework to understand the politics around platform firms, exploring three angles: the specific type of business power these firms have, the way platform firms are taking over core state functions, and how technology entrepreneurs organize to advance their preferences.