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...

We study the short and long-term spillover effects of a pay reform that substantially increased the returns to schooling in Israeli kibbutzim. This pay reform, which induced kibbutz students to improve their academic achievements during high school, spilled over to non-kibbutz members who...

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...

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...

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....

In evaluating the effect of an R&D subsidy we need to know what the subsidized firm would have spent on R&D had it not received the subsidy. Using data on Israeli manufacturing firms in the 1990s we find evidence suggesting that the R&D subsidies granted by the Ministry of Industry and Trade...

A number of market failures have been associated with R&D investments and significant amounts of public money have been spent on programs to stimulate innovative activities. In this paper, we review some recent microeconomic studies evaluating effects of government sponsored commercial R&D. We...

The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox population doubles each seventeen years. With 60 % of prime aged males attending Yeshiva rather than working, that community is rapidly outgrowing its resources. Why do fathers with families in poverty choose Yeshiva over work? Draft deferments subsidize Yeshiva...

This paper uses a unified analytical framework to assess, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the relevance of the different hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the real effects of exchange rate-based stabilizations. The four major hypotheses analyzed are: (i) the supply-side...

A large and growing literature has used patent and patent citation data to measure knowledge spillovers across inventions and organizations, but relatively few papers in this literature have explicitly considered the collaboration networks formed by inventors as a mechanism for shaping and...