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