Benjamin Arold
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benjaminarold.bsky.social
Benjamin Arold
@benjaminarold.bsky.social
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, @Cambridge.
Before @ETH, @LMU_Muenchen, @ifo_Institut.
Economics of Education, Labor, Public, Religion, and AI.
Reposted by Benjamin Arold
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
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...
jhr.uwpress.org
October 22, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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?
March 24, 2025 at 1:45 PM