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About

Laura Ripani is a prominent labor economist whose research focuses on the future of work, automation, and gender inequality in Latin American labor markets. As a leading voice on the Fourth Industrial Revolution's implications for developing economies, she has made significant contributions to understanding how technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and digitization reshape employment and wages across the region. Her most influential work, "Automation in Latin America: Are Women at Higher Risk of Losing Their Jobs?" (2021), has garnered 67 citations and broke new ground by examining the gendered dimensions of automation risk across multiple Latin American countries. Complementing this, her study on U.S. robotic adoption and its spillover effects on Colombian labor markets — cited 49 times — demonstrated that automation in advanced economies can meaningfully harm workers in developing nations, expanding the global conversation beyond high-income contexts. Ripani's early contributions, including a 2017 Spanish-language publication exploring automation and regional integration, helped establish the intellectual foundation for this emerging field in Latin America. With over 130 cumulative citations, her body of work has become essential reading for policymakers, development economists, and researchers seeking to understand how technological transformation intersects with inequality and labor market vulnerability across the Global South.