We study the effects of labor market liberalization on political behavior and attitudes towards free-market capitalism and socialism, exploiting a reform whereby the Israeli socialist communities called kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to market-based wages. Our identification strategy...

We study the impact of financial incentives on higher education decisions and the choice of major. We rely on a reform whereby Israeli kibbutzim shifted from their traditional policy of equal sharing to productivity-based wages. We use for identification the staggered implementation of this...

Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits - or lack thereof - depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied...

Common property arrangements have long been considered inefficient and short lived, since they encourage high-productivity individuals to leave and shirking among those who stay. In contrast, kibbutzim | voluntary common property settlements in Israel | have lasted almost a century. Recently,...

In the face of deepening economic precarity, Americans have been turning to one another for informal support. What is the value of this collectivist safety net? Through a combination of anthropology and economics, this study introduces a way to measure collectivist practices. Applying this...

Research on the political and social impacts of financial crises has focused chiefly on free market economies, hindering our understanding of their effects in other settings. We exploit an episode of a financial crisis that hit the Israeli kibbutzim to study its impact in a socialist context....