Benjamin W. Arold

Benjamin W. Arold is an Assistant Professor (promotion-track to Associate Professor) at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich and earned his Ph.D. in Economics from LMU Munich. He has 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 AI & economics. His work investigates how school curricula influence student achievement, attitudes, beliefs, choices, and long-term labor market outcomes. Another significant strand of his research employs tools from AI, natural language processing (NLP), and computational linguistics to examine the effects of economic policies and educational interventions.

His publications span prestigious journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, and Journal of Human Resources. His work has received widespread attention from media outlets including The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and VoxEU.

Scientific Awards:

• Prize for Best Dissertation 2021/2022 by the German Economic Association's Section on Economics of Education
• Fürther Ludwig Erhard Prize 2023

Dr. Arold has taught courses on Economic Analysis of Non-Standard Data at Cambridge, Text Data in Business and Economics at Basel University, and NLP and Computational Linguistics in Economics at Princeton University. His teaching materials are publicly available on GitHub, demonstrating his commitment to open educational resources.