Publications

Llanos-Paredes, P. (2023) The Effect of Applied Research Institutes on Invention: Evidence from the Fraunhofer Centres in Europe. Research Evaluation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvad028

This study examines the impact of the Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest network of applied research institutes, on patent applications. A difference-in-differences strategy was employed exploiting the establishment of five new Fraunhofer centres in the 2000s. The panel includes 65,963 European applicants (both firms and independent inventors) between 1980 and 2019. The results show that establishing a centre increases patent output by at least 13%, robust to using applicants of cities that established a centre by the end of the 2010s as an alternative control group. The effect is driven by an increase in applicants’ productivity and not by agglomeration dynamics.

Perez, L. M., and Llanos-Paredes, P. (2017). Vulnerable Women in a Thriving Country: An Analysis of Twenty-First-Century Domestic Workers in Peru. Latin American Research Review, 52(4), 552–570. DOI: http://doi.org/10.25222/larr.67

Paid domestic workers represent a historically discriminated-against group comprising mostly ethnically marginalized, resource-poor migrant women. In twenty-first-century Peru, social and labor rights have not improved significantly for those in the sector despite more than a decade of sustained economic growth that took off in 2002 and lasted until 2014. Though the present national trend suggests that the absolute number of workers in this sector is dropping and that the tendency of workers to “live in” with their employers is reversing (trends that might signal improved working conditions for those in the sector), significant gaps still exist between the rights of domestic workers as compared to other workers. This article analyzes the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and/or migration status, and class as one possible explanation for the continued vulnerability of paid domestic workers. We examine statistical information on the present situation in Peru, including a trends analysis of the National Household Survey from 2004 to 2013, and share the results of our qualitative research on the sector for the same period. We conclude with recommendations for future studies.

Work in Progress

Llanos-Paredes, P. [2025, under review] Conditional Industrial Policy in Action: Employment and Productivity Effects of a German Investment Subsidy. Preprint.

Comparative and historical studies have suggested that conditionalities are essential in the design of effective industrial policies. In this article, I test this hypothesis by exploiting novel data on the beneficiaries of a conditional investment subsidy in Germany. I link the records with detailed financial data of German manufacturing firms, and leverage the spatial targeting of the policy to implement a difference-in-differences strategy. The results show that the intervention had a large and positive impact on employment and total factor productivity. The comparison with another (unconditional) subsidy provides further evidence of the relevance of conditionalities in its design.

Frey, C., and Llanos-Paredes, P. [2025, under review] Lost in Translation: Artificial Intelligence and the Demand for Foreign Language Skills.  Preprint

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked debate over its employment effects, yet evidence on AI’s labor market impacts remains scant. This study investigates the labor market effects of machine translation (MT) on a) employment and wages in the translation profession; and b) the demand for foreign language skills across occupations and industries. Taking advantage of the heterogeneity in the use of MT across 695 local labor markets in the United States, we analyze its effects post-2010, when Google Translate was released as an app. Doing so, we document a negative relationship between Google Translate adoption and translator employment, corroborated by an instrumental variable approach, and a host of placebo regressions. Similarly, improvements in MT reduced the demand for all foreign language skills investigated, including for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German.

Llanos-Paredes, P. [2025, R&R] The Persistent Effect of Trade Shocks on Employment: Evidence from the China Shock in Europe. Labour Economics.

Frey, C., and Llanos-Paredes, P. [2025] Who Governs Climate Change? Business Interests and the American Clean Energy and Security Act.