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Reposted by Benjamin Arold

The Janeway Institute, Cambridge @janewayinstitute.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

In a new Keynes Fund sponsored video, @benjaminarold.bsky.social asks: how much do employees really value the benefits they receive in employment? The data uncovers a surprising answer. #econsky #KeynesFund youtu.be/Mlfli5pvgHA?...

youtu.be

How Much Do Employees Really Value their Work Benefits? | Keynes Fund Project | Benjamin Arold

YouTube video by Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

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Reposted by Benjamin Arold

ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin @rfberlin.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

🆕 RFBerlin Discussion Paper! @benjaminarold.bsky.social, @elliottash.bsky.social, W. Bentley MacLeod and Suresh Naidu study worker rights in collective bargaining and how legal protections shape bargaining outcomes and wage dynamics. 🔗 rfberlin.com/wp-content/u...

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Reposted by Benjamin Arold

Dan Goldhaber @cedr.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

And oh boy, "Adam's Research Minute" is a banger. The @benjaminarold.bsky.social, @woessmann.bsky.social, Zierow research on how schooling affects religiosity is super important and interesting. Here's the link to the journal article: jhr.uwpress.org/content/earl... 6/n

jhr.uwpress.org

Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes?

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in model...

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Benjamin Arold @benjaminarold.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Religious education in school has long-lasting effects on adulthood religiosity and labor market success. 👇 See our new paper @ Journal of Human Resources:

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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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