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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

7/7 👉Valuation & Conclusion: 🔹Use labor tax shocks to estimate effects on wages 🔹Bringing estimations together: One-standard-deviation increase in worker rights equals ~5.7% wage increase 🔹Conclude: Worker rights have real economic value, not merely symbolic

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

6/7 👉Empirical Results II: Employment 🔹Use leave-one-out employment rates as instruments for bargaining power shocks in DiD estimation 🔹Higher employment rate leads to more worker rights clauses 🔹Improved employment opportunities strengthen worker bargaining power

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

5/7 👉Empirical Results I: Labor Tax 🔹Use provincial labor income tax changes as shocks in DiD estimation 🔹Higher provincial labor taxes lead to more worker rights clauses 🔹Demonstrates substitution from taxed income toward untaxed amenities

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

4/7 👉Validation: 🔹Human and LLM-scaled pairwise clause comparisons confirm our worker rights measure benefits workers 🔹Correlation of rights measure with pro-worker HR practices (World Management Survey by @I_Am_NickBloom et al.) 🔹Case study: 2005 Auto Workers Crisis

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

3/7 👉NLP Pipeline & Data: 🔹30,000 Canadian CBAs (1986-2015) 🔹Dependency parsing identifies linguistic structure of text which we map to legal categories ("employees shall receive...") 🔹LLM embeddings & clustering to classify rights into distinct topics

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

2/7 👉 Motivation: 🔹CBAs contain extensive worker rights beyond wages 🔹We investigate if these rights have real economic value 🔹Key question: Are these legal rights mere "cheap talk" or valued amenities?

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

🚨New Working Paper: The Value of Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining w/ @elliottash.bsky.social , W. Bentley MacLeod & Suresh Naidu We propose novel NLP methods applied to 30,000 collective bargaining agreements to quantify the value of worker rights. 👉 nber.org/papers/w33605 🧵1/7

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