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....

I use a longitudinal dataset of individuals entering and exiting Israeli kibbutzim, communities that engage in equal sharing of output, to test the mobility patterns induced by redistribution. I find evidence of negative selection in entry to kibbutzim and positive selection in exit. Entrants...