Professor Benjamin Arold, a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Cambridge, shares compelling insights from his research titled “The Value of Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining.”

This research introduces innovative natural language methods to measure worker rights from 30,000 Canadian collective bargaining agreements (1986–2015). By parsing legal obligations and rights using unsupervised text-as-data techniques, it shows that stronger worker rights correlate with pro-worker management practices. The study finds that higher labor taxes shift compensation from wages to untaxed amenities like worker rights, and that improved outside job options lead to stronger worker rights clauses. Overall, a one-standard-deviation increase in worker rights is valued at approximately 5.7% of wages.

Prof. Benjamin, previously served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from LMU Munich. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University and Princeton University.

Dr. Arold is an applied microeconomist with research interests in labor and education economics, the economics of religion, and the intersection of AI and economics. His work explores how school curricula shape student achievement, beliefs, choices, and long-term labor market outcomes. Another strand of his research leverages tools from AI, natural language processing (NLP), and computational linguistics to analyze the impact of economic policies and educational interventions on workers and students. His doctoral thesis received the Best Dissertation Award (2021/2022) from the German Economic Association’s Section on Economics of Education, and he was awarded the Fürther Ludwig Erhard Prize in 2023.

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How Worker Rights Shape Wages and Workplaces: Insights from Cambridge Economist Prof. Benjamin Arold

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