 His PhD was in Economics from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1976).He remained as a researcher at St. Anthony's College Oxford into the early 70s (1966–73 and 1984–85), working on land reform, rural unemployment and the capitalist logic of sharecropping in Southern Spain and also conducting research in Cuba (on smallholders in the early years of Castro's Cuba) and in Peru (on the hacienda peasantry).He was visiting professor at the State University of Campinas (Brasil) in 1974, before returning to his home town to join the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, in 1975.