Benjamin Arold

🚨New Working Paper: The Value of Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining w/ @ellliottt, W. Bentley MacLeod & @snaidunl 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

Why do people make choices that are not in their best interest? Fun convo with @CassSunstein on why social media may be a “Product Market Trap”… how AI as an “Imperfect Oracle” will never be able to predict who we fall in love with… and the resistance he faced when pushing against the rationalist paradigm in economics and law.

@Prashant_Garg_ Amazing, big congrats!!

Call me Dr Garg as of today! 🥹🤓

As AI lowers the cost of producing papers, asking the right question matters more. I built Frontier Graph: an open-source tool to explore open questions in economics, drawing on 240K papers across 300 journals.

In a new video, @BenjaminArold @CamEcon asks: how much do employees really value the benefits they receive in employment? The data uncovers a surprising answer. #econtwitter #KeynesFund youtu.be/Mlfli5pvgHA?si… via @YouTube

🚨Now out in the Economic Journal: “Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital: Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests” w/ @EricHanushek, @KinneLavinia & P. Sancassani 💡Patience accounts for ¾ of regional achievement diffs in 🇮🇹, ⅓ 🇺🇸 👉doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea…

@JeanPaulCarv Amazing, warm congratulations!

Delighted to serve as an Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics

Much looking forward to teaching Text and Image Data Analysis in beautiful Lisbon this summer!

📢Call for papers: CESifo Area Conference on Economics of Education co-organized w/ @EricHanushek (Stanford) 🏛️11-12 Sept 2026, Munich 🧑‍🏫Keynote: John List (Chicago) @Econ_4_Everyone 👉ifo.de/en/cesifo/even… ⏰Deadline: 11 May 2026 🖼️Past programs: sites.google.com/view/woessmann…

How do you motivate workers? Leo Bursztyn, Ewan Racliffe and I have a new paper. We look at highly skilled 'workers' whose effort was near-impossible to monitor -- German fighter pilots in WW2.

🚨 New working paper: 🕺 Dancing on the Saddles 1/ Solow and Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans gave us phase diagrams to visualize growth dynamics. But we lack a systematic counterpart for stochastic environments. I extend saddle-path analysis by introducing "conditional saddle paths."

On Monday I gave the "New Developments in Language Models for Economics" lecture at AEA! Link to the video and slides in the next post, and then a 🧵.

The economic value of worker rights in union contracts Benjamin W. Arold @BenjaminArold @Cambridge_Uni, Elliott Ash @ellliottt @ETH @ETH_en @eth_cle, W. Bentley MacLeod @columbia_econ @Columbia, Suresh Naidu @Columbia ow.ly/6h3H50XG6ys

📢Our piece on @JonHaidt's "After Babel" Substack: Strong public support to restrict social media for children in Germany afterbabel.com/p/strong-publi… A huge majority of adults favors a minimum age for social media – and even adolescents themselves see harm from social media

🚨Unsere neue Studie zeigt: 👉Das Erreichen der Ziele „Bessere Bildung 2035“ würde rund 21 Billionen Euro an zusätzlicher Wirtschaftsleistung bringen "Volkswirtschaftliche Erträge besserer Bildung" mit Katia Werkmeister für die @BertelsmannSt ifo.de/publikationen/… 1/3

Unions deliver more than wages. In our new @VoxEU column, @ellliottt, W. B. MacLeod, S. Naidu and I use 30,000 Canadian union contracts to show that worker rights like scheduling and job security have economic value. Policy debates should look beyond pay. tinyurl.com/3htrcccf

People w/PhDs are more likely to be inventors. But do PhDs-->innovation or is it all selection? My brilliant student Manfredi Aliberti finds answer is YES using possibly the best setting : Italy in the 1980s. Read his JMP (and interview him!) to know more tinyurl.com/432sw6cz

🆕 RFBerlin Discussion Paper! @BenjaminArold, @ellliottt, W. Bentley MacLeod, & Suresh Naidu study worker rights in collective bargaining and how legal protections shape bargaining outcomes and wage dynamics. 🔗 rfberlin.com/wp-content/upl…

The Faculty of Economics is pleased to announce its 2025 Job Market Candidates. A complete list of the JMCs can be found here: econ.cam.ac.uk/people/job-mar… Over the next few days, we will introduce each of them with a tweet on their JMP, plus details of their career and research.

@jaredcrubin @edenhofer_jacob Big congratulations!

Now forthcoming at Quarterly Journal of Economics! Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis Most recent version available at: digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_...

Loved my time as Postdoc in the group of @ellliottt Ash! Happy to answer questions about postdoc life in beautiful Zurich & the great team @eth_cle 👇