The division of America into red states and blue states misleadingly suggests that states are split into two camps, but along most dimensions, like political orientation, states are on a continuum. By historical standards, the number of swing states is not particularly low, and America's...

How do geographic and historical-cultural factors shape new business formation? Using novel data on new business registrations, we document that 75% of the variation in new business formation is explained by time-invariant county-level factors and examine the extent to which such variation is...

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework which allows us to separate selection from treatment effects of large...

Does the intellectual endowment of children affect parents' fertility choices? The quantity-quality model of fertility predicts that a positive (negative) shock to child endowment increases (decreases) parental demand for children. We test these predictions using Israeli data on intellectually...

School authorities, universities, and employers often schedule multiple tests on the same day or week, causing overlapping exam preparation and a dense testing schedule. This multitask learning can be intense, under pressure, and challenge the student's mental and physical perseverance. As a...

The conventional wisdom is that because at any time the aged cost more than the young, there is a positive relationship between aging and health care spending. It is hard, however, to find evidence that aging correlates positively with such spending. Intrigued by the puzzle, we account for the...

In the early 1990s Israel experienced a large and concentrated surge of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Most Russian immigrants had high education levels relative to the average Israeli. Despite the size and skill mix of the immigration shock, existing research has found little...

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...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of R&D policy in Israel, and critically examine the policies currently in place as well as proposals to change them. We review in Part I the various programs of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in...

We examine the effect of language acquisition on the growth of immigrants' earnings. We gathered data on recent Soviet immigrants to Israel that include retrospective questions on earnings and language ability on entry into their current job. Language acquisition is found to interact positively...