Maldonado's main areas of research are Public Economics and Social Policies with an emphasis on problems and policies that affect young people. He has carried out theoretical and empirical work and in both cases where he dealt with the design of social policy (education, pensions, taxes and conditional transfers) and the effects of current policies in Colombia (educational policies, conditional transfers, social protection). His research looks closely at the way social policy is structured. He has been involved in several exercises examining the state and results of Colombian public policy in these same areas (through various studies for the Colombian Government, Fundación Compartir and the British Council), which have led to discussions at the national level about the need for policy change and what form the new policy should take. His research has been published in international indexed journals such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Health Economics and the Journal of Public Economics among others. He participates as a professor of courses where students develop skills for the design and analysis of public policy. In particular, he is a professor of the Ethics, Justice and Public Policy course where the main theories on justice in public policy are studied with an emphasis on the scope of these theories to think about problems in developing countries. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Educational Development. Between 2014 and 2021 he was director of research at the School of Government of the Universidad de los Andes.