Working Papers 2025
Working paper 1-2025
Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler
Monopolistic Data Dumping
Abstract
A monopolist curates a database of current and historical observations for users who want to learn some parameter. Nowcasters ("forecasters") wish to learn its current (long-run) value. The monopolist chooses the size of each data type, facing constant marginal storage cost, and a menu of contracts, consisting of a fee and access level to each data type. The optimal menu offers full access to historical data, but discriminates access to current data: either full to all consumers or full to nowcasters and none to forecasters. Relative to social optimum, there is too much (little) historical (current) data, and sometimes too much total data.
Working paper 2-2025
Industry Firm Dynamics and Financing Conditions
Nittai K. Bergman, Rajkamal Iyer, Paymon Khorrani, William Mullins
Abstract
This paper analyzes how changes in financing conditions affect industry dynamics. We show that
industry leaders, defined as firms with the largest market share in a given industry, perform better than industry followers during periods of tight financing conditions. When financing conditions are tight, industry leaders outperform industry followers and experience higher abnormal returns, gain market share, invest more, raise more long-term debt, and have higher profitability rates. These effects are primarily concentrated in industries in which the disparity between leaders and followers, as measured by market capitalization, is large. Given these heterogeneous intra-industry effects, our results indicate that tight financing conditions widen inequality between industry leaders and followers, particularly when pre-existing industry inequality is large.
Working paper 3-2025
Central Bank Digital Currency: When Price and Bank Stability (Don't) Collide
Daniel Bird and David Weiss
Abstract
In a recent influential paper, Schilling, Fernández-Villaverde and Uhlig (2024) caution that the introduction of a central bank digital currency gives rise to a central bank trilemma in a nominal version of the quintessential Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model of bank-runs. We show that there is a natural policy tool that can be introduced into their environment to solve this trilemma.
Working paper 4-2025
Entrepreneurship and the Racial Wealth Gap
Daniel Albuquerque, Tomer Ifergane
Abstract
Entrepreneurship promotes wealth accumulation. However, Black households face significant barriers to entrepreneurship, operating fewer and smaller businesses. We formalize a general equilibrium model of entrepreneurship choice and wealth accumulation in which Black households experience adverse distortions as entrepreneurs and as workers. Disciplined by microdata, our model matches well the observed racial wealth gap and the correlation between wealth and entrepreneurship. We find that distortions faced by Black entrepreneurs are the key factor for understanding the racial wealth gap across the wealth distribution. Our analysis also indicates that addressing racial disparities in the U.S. can substantially increase output.
Working paper 5-2025
Bureaucracy in quest of feasibility
Herve Cres a, Itzhak Gilboa, Nicolas Vieille
Abstract
A bureaucracy has to determine the values of many decision variables while satisfying a set of constraints. The bureaucracy is not assumed to have any objective function beyond achieving a feasible solution, which can be viewed as ‘‘satisficing’’ à la Simon (1955). We assume that the variables are integer-valued and the constraints are linear. We show that simple and (arguably) natural versions of the problem are already NPHard. We therefore look at decentralized decisions, where each office controls but one decision variable and can determine its value as a function of its past values. However, an attempt to consult more than a single past case can lead to Condorcet-style consistency problems. We prove an Arrovian result, showing that, under certain conditions, feasibility is guaranteed only if all offices mimic their decisions in the same past case. This result can be viewed as explaining a status quo bias.
Published in Journal of Mathematical Economics 114 (2024) 1031046
Working paper 6-2025
Strategic Effort and Organizational Performance: Evidence from a Hospital Reform
Omer Dagan, Shirlee Lichtman-Sadot, Ity Shurtz, Yehezkel Waisman, Dan Zeltzer
Abstract
Interactions among organizational units may have a significant impact on efficiency. We examine a hospital reform that changed the emergency department’s (ED) method for allocating admissions across internal medicine departments from a “first-availablebed” policy, which disproportionately burdened efficient departments, to “equal-load,” which distributed admissions evenly. Comparing outcomes before and after the reform with the same period in the previous year, we find that the reform reduced ED wait times by 25% (1.5 hours per patient) and inpatient length of stay by 20% (one day per patient), with no change in readmission or mortality outcomes. A queuing model with strategic departmental effort demonstrates that these improvements are consistent with reduced incentives for free-riding. Findings highlight opportunities for managers in hospitals and other service organizations with distributed workload systems to significantly ease congestion through incentive alignment rather than resource expansion.
Working paper 7-2025
Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media
Luca Braghieri, Ro’ee Levy, and Hannah Trachtman
Abstract
We document pervasive behavioral and information frictions in news consumption on social media, and test interventions designed to address them through a large field experiment on Facebook. We find that a simple, platform-integrated interface prompting active choice significantly and persistently reduced the partisan slant of users’ Facebook news portfolios, while coupling this interface with information substantially improved portfolio reliability. Our interventions also increased alignment between users’ stated preferences and their Facebook portfolios and influenced off-platform news consumption. The results underscore the promise of simple, behaviorally-informed, and scalable interventions to enhance news consumption on social media platforms.
Working paper 8-2025
The Effects of Social Movements: Evidence from #MeToo
Ro'ee Levy and Martin Mattsson
Abstract
Social movements are associated with large societal changes, but evidence of their causal effects is limited. We study the effect of the MeToo movement on an important personal decision—reporting a sex crime to the police. Victims often do not report sex crimes due to the personal costs involved, but the reporting of sex crimes can have positive externalities and therefore, improve social welfare. Using a differencein- differences strategy comparing sex crimes and non-sex crimes before and after the MeToo movement started, we find that the movement increased the number of sex crimes reported by approximately 10% and that the effect persisted until the end of our data, 15-27 months after the movement started. The result is confirmed using a triple-difference strategy comparing countries with strong and weak MeToo movements. Using detailed US data, we show that the MeToo movement not only increased reporting but also increased arrests for sexual assaults; and that in contrast to a common criticism of the movement, the effects are similar across racial and socioeconomic groups. Based on additional survey and crime data, we find that the increased reporting reflects a higher propensity to report sex crimes rather than an increase in the incidence of sex crimes. Our results demonstrate that social movements can rapidly and persistently change high-stakes decisions.
Working paper 9-2025
Decomposing the Rise of the Populist Radical Right
Oren Danieli, Noam Gidron, Shinnosuke Kikuchi, Ro’ee Levy
Abstract
Support for populist radical right parties in Europe has dramatically increased in recent years. We decompose the rise of these parties from 2005 to 2020 into four components: shifts in party positions, changes in voter attributes (opinions and demographics), changes in voter priorities, and a residual. We merge two wide datasets on party positions and voter attributes and estimate voter priorities using a probabilistic voting model. We find that shifts in party positions and changes in voter attributes do not play a major role in the recent success of populist radical right parties. Instead, the primary driver behind their electoral success lies in voters’ changing priorities. Particularly, voters are less likely to decide which party to support based on parties’ economic positions. Rather, voters—mainly older, nonunionized, low-educated men—increasingly prioritize nativist cultural positions. This allows populist radical right parties to tap into a preexisting reservoir of culturally conservative voters. Using the same datasets, we provide a set of reduced-form evidence supporting our results. First, while parties’ positions have changed, these changes are not consistent with the main supply-side hypotheses for populist support. Second, on aggregate, voters have not adopted populist right-wing opinions. Third, voters are more likely to self-identify ideologically based on their cultural rather than their economic opinions.
Working paper 10-2025
Beyond Test Scores: Does Public Information on School Satisfaction and Violence Levels Affect Parental School Choice?
Genia Rachkovski
Abstract
Amid the proliferation of school choice policies, substantial disparities persist in the quality of schools selected by high and low socioeconomic-status (SES) families. Can we decrease this gap by providing parents with better information, and if so, what information is effective at inducing parents to select better schools? To address these questions, I leverage a unique natural experiment in Israel, where a Supreme Court ruling mandated the public release of comprehensive school-level information. Employing a discrete choice model, an event study design, and a difference-in-difference approach, I examine the impact of this information disclosure on student school choice. I find that in regions with multiple school options, following the information disclosure, parents increasingly favor schools with better attributes. Notably, this shift is primarily attributed to factors such as violence levels and students’ school satisfaction ratings, rather than test score information. Importantly, the results show that the effect is driven by the increased response of lower SES households to the non-score-related attributes, narrowing the preexisting selection gap from their high SES counterparts. Crucially, I establish a robust association between school violence levels and school value-added measures, and find that lower SES households were more likely to select schools with higher value added following the information disclosure. Furthermore, I find that schools respond to the increased accountability by improving in the non academic publicized attributes. Finally, I identify information-sharing networks, based on shared ethnic and cultural ties, influencing school choices. My findings demonstrate the importance of providing a diverse set of school attribute information to enhance equity, academic outcomes and social mobility.
