Benjamin Arold
@BenjaminArold
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Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, @cambridge_uni. Before @ETH, @LMU_Muenchen, @ifo_Institut. Economics of Labor, Education, Religion, and AI
Cambridge, UK
Joined June 2021
🚨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. 👉 https://t.co/FdTCaIgRAU 🧵1/7
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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 https://t.co/FMIaBBNDn2
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🆕 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. 🔗 https://t.co/kC68mLePrF
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The Faculty of Economics is pleased to announce its 2025 Job Market Candidates. A complete list of the JMCs can be found here: https://t.co/KTzxzXD25i Over the next few days, we will introduce each of them with a tweet on their JMP, plus details of their career and research.
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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 👇
📢 Hiring a Postdoc: Economics + Data Science (AI, NLP, ML) Come work in my group at ETH Zurich! Position is for econ/adjacent PhDs. Flexible start date. 1-3 year position. Apply by Dec 1st.
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The Sorting Hat has spoken – I am thrilled to share that I have found my Cambridge College. I have joined @SidneySussex College Cambridge as a Fellow, alongside my position at the Faculty of Economics @CamEcon @Cambridge_Uni. Thanks a ton for the warm welcome, @SidneySussex!
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Can schools change faith? @BenjaminArold, @Woessmann, & @LarissaZierow find that ending mandatory #ReligiousEducation reduces adult #religiosity by 7%. Students earn more, work longer hours, but pray less and skip church. https://t.co/l9NsnWprn0
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Prospective AI PhDs and Postdocs -- Applications open for ETH AI Center Fellowships, deadline Nov 7th! link in reply @ETH_AI_Center
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An oh boy, "Adam's Research Minute" is a banger. The @BenjaminArold, @Woessmann, @LarissaZierow research on how schooling affects religiosity is super important and interesting. Here's the link to the journal article: https://t.co/cJoFtS8f0U 6/n
jhr.uwpress.org
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...
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🇩🇪 Version: ❓Platzt die KI-Blase? 👉Mein Interview im @newscientist, dass Profit-zu-Firmenwert in Tech so niedrig ist wie vor 25 Jahren zur Dotcom-Blase. Eine Korrektur mag kommen – aber die Geschichte zeigt: KI bleibt, so wie Eisenbahn & Internet ihre Krisen überlebten.
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❓Is the AI bubble about to burst? 👉I spoke with @newscientist that profit-to-valuation ratios in tech are as low as during the dot-com bubble 25 years ago. A correction may come - but history shows the tech itself will endure, just as railways & internet outlasted their busts
With billions and billions pouring into AI, financial organisations are starting to warn of the potential risk when the bubble pops - but even if companies go bust, AI as a technology is here to stay.
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Looking forward to your submissions! Deadline of Jan 15th. Questions/clarifications welcome---
📢The Call for Papers for @EJ_RES special issue ‘AI Measurement in Applied Economics’ is now open. 🚨Deadline: 15 January 2026 📅 More info here👉 https://t.co/KfXqvBms96
@albertobisin @ellliottt @RoyalEconSoc @OUPSocSci #EconTwitter
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Research by @benjaminarold et al suggests abolishing compulsory religious education in Germany reduced religiosity in adulthood, and had economically relevant consequences on employment, earnings, and fertility: TL;DR:🧵by coauthor @woessman: https://t.co/6uy8fGzeMb
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Religious education in school has long-lasting effects on adulthood religiosity and labor market success. 👇 See our new paper @J_HumanResource #econtwitter
🚨Now out in @J_HumanResource: ⛪️Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education w/ @BenjaminArold & @LarissaZierow 👉Religious education in school affects students’ adult lives 🔗 https://t.co/LByJjPpH14 A🧵 1/6
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📢Call for papers: 🚀4th CESifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education🤩 30-31 March 2026, Munich Keynote: @michelacarlana (Harvard) PhD students & early postdocs, please apply! https://t.co/mQIXPqx7Xv Deadline: 11 Jan 2026 Co-organizers @CaterinaPavese1 @mtotarelli
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Recently accepted by #QJE, “Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice,” by Ash (@ellliottt), Chen, and Naidu:
academic.oup.com
Abstract. This article empirically studies the effects of the early law and economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Insti
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🚨 85% (!) der Erwachsenen sind für ein Mindestalter von 16 Jahren für Social Media. Selbst unter den Jugendlichen ist eine relative Mehrheit dafür. 👉 Dies und mehr im neuen ifo Bildungsbarometer 2025: https://t.co/XpLA6ljgkc 1/7
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Try out #Apertus, the fully open LLM (8B and 70B) developed by the Swiss AI Initiative (ETH, EPFL, CSCS). Apertus isn’t just open-weights—it’s fully reproducible -- "Apertus" is Latin for "Open"! ✅ Full code, data, checkpoints ✅ Respects robots.txt (retroactively) ✅ 🐠
🚀 Together with ETH Zürich and the CSCS, we have just released Apertus, 🇨🇭 Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity. Find out more:
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Last day to submit! This is the anniversary edition: We are hosting the workshop for the 10th time! Apart from presentations of your work on text as data (or other unstructured data; can be from any subfield), we will have a keynote lecture by Anton Korinek on AI in research.
📢#CallForPapers Submissions are now welcome for the 10th Monash-Paris-Warwick-Zurich-CEPR Text-As-Data Workshop. Papers using text, audio, images, or other unstructured data are welcome. 📅Deadline: 25 August Organisers: @ellliottt @essobecker & @phinifa
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