Maria Vargas is an associate professor at the Accounting and Finance Department and an associate researcher at the Institute on Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS) at the University of Zaragoza. Her teaching is focused on degree and master’s subjects related to corporate finance.
Her research topics were, at first, centred on mutual funds in general terms, and later on socially responsible mutual funds. Thus, her most notable research works deal with the analysis of how the constraints emerging from considering different types of non-financial issues when building investment portfolios impact mutual fund managers’ skills.
Additionally, she also analyses the socially responsible investors’ behaviour topics, concretely the cash-flow timing skills of these investors; the differentiation strategies implemented by socially responsible mutual funds, which are based on the information provided in fund prospectuses; the style-deviation practices in the socially responsible mutual fund industry and their consequences on money flows and the sustainable scores. Sustainability has also been analysed from another perspective; specifically, the researcher applies the Global Sustainable Competitiveness Index to a sample of sovereign bond funds to find a profitable and sustainable investment strategy for the investor. 
She has supervised four PhD dissertations, three of them focused on mutual funds.