Arantxa Jarque joined the Research Department as an economist in September 2009 after spending a year teaching economics at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain. Jarque had been a visiting economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond from 2007 to 2008. Previously, she was an assistant professor of economics at Universidad de Alicante in Spain. Jarque earned her doctorate from the University of Rochester in 2005.

Jarque's research interests include dynamic contract theory, banking, and industrial organization. In particular, she studies dynamic principal-agent problems with moral hazard, focusing on situations in which the unobserved actions of the agent have a persistent effect in time. Jarque has applied some of her findings to the design of optimal CEO compensation and to analyzing incentive contracts in the financial sector.