Patrick Arni is a Senior Lecturer at University of Bristol, School of Economics. He received his PhD from the Department of Economics at HEC Lausanne. He completed the PhD program of the Swiss National Bank Study Center Gerzensee. In the past he was a visiting scholar at the Center of Labor Economics at UC Berkeley and, previously, at Tilburg University. Patrick obtained a Master's degree from University of Zurich and did additional studies at University of Geneva.

His research focuses on the empirical analysis of public policies and applied microeconometrics. Current fields of application are in digital transformation, labor, education, health and social policy. In current work he studies the impact of digital transformation and technological change on skill demand dynamics. Furthermore, he analyzes the effect of the design, incentives and policy programs in unemployment insurance, welfare and other public policies. This includes labor market policies, sanctions & monitoring, benefit schemes etc. Further strands of research are the analysis of job search behavior (like the role of effort decisions, information, networks) and the evaluation of the impacts of beliefs, relative assessments and overconfidence on different economic outcomes.

Further, Patrick Arni specializes in the collection of novel combinations of register and survey data. One current line of projects links different types of large-scale register data in Switzerland, exploring also possible opportunities for "big data" analysis methods. Moreover, he is involved in the design and evaluation of several randomized field experiments in unemployment insurance. Further data projects focus on the development of survey measures for individual beliefs and over-/underconfidence with respect to different economic outcomes. See also the research homepage for further details.

He became an IZA Research Affiliate in November 2010 and was an IZA Research Associate from September 2011 until October 2016.