Social Preferences Over Taste-Based Inequality (joint with Rachel Cohen and Amnon Malz, Revise & Resubmit, International Economic Review)

Many unequal economic allocation decisions involve the judgment of the decision-maker in charge of the allocation. This judgment may be rooted in objective measures like grades or performance, but it can also incorporate a subjective component. The subjective component may be perceived as fair when parties' needs are taken into consideration, but it may also be viewed as unjust, particularly in cases of discrimination based on personal taste. In an experimental impartial-spectator design, we explore whether individuals perceive this type of subjective taste-based inequality as fair. We compare their attitudes towards it with those arising from inequalities grounded in objective procedures, namely, merit and luck. We also zoom-in on the differences in fairness perceptions towards luck, merit, and taste-based inequalities among individuals with above-average and below-average incomes. Using a large sample of the Israeli adult population (n=1,156), we find that taste-based inequality is perceived distinctively compared to inequalities arising from luck or merit. Nevertheless, spectators' redistribution decisions imply that it is treated as an unfair source of inequality, similar to luck and unlike merit. Additionally, our work reveals that the commonly reported finding of merit being considered more fair than luck is primarily driven by individuals with above-average income.

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Impacts of Home-Care Subsidies: Evidence from Quasi-Random Assignment, (Joint with Avner Shlain and Dan Zeltzer, Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Public Economics)

We study the impact of subsidizing home-based long-term care on recipients’ health and the labor supply of their working-age children. We use administrative data from Israel on the universe of welfare benefit applications linked with tax records of applicants and their adult children. To address the endogeneity of benefit recipients’ health status, we instrument for benefit receipt using the leniency of randomly assigned evaluators who assess the applicant’s functional status and determine benefit eligibility. We find that for compliers – applicants who receive subsidies only from more lenient evaluators – subsidizing home-based care has large adverse effects on recipient health but no detectable effects on the labor market outcomes of their children. The results are consistent with the crowd-out of self-care for the marginal recipient, highlighting the need to assess the heterogeneous effects of home-care subsidies.

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To Be or Not to Be on Social Media: How Social Media Content Impacts Recruitment (joint with Edmund Baker and Veronika Grimm, submitted)(short video)
This paper extends the literature studying the effect of social media content on the evaluation of job candidates. In a large-scale online experiment that resembles real-life screening of candidates for a job in the hospitality sector, we find that information available on social media through hashtags and liked pages can have a crucial effect on a candidate's chances of obtaining a good rating. Candidates with social media content indicating mental health problems receive lower ratings by an amount equivalent to the effect of having three years on-the-job experience. Interestingly, candidates with no social media profile receive even lower ratings than candidates with mental health problems. In addition, unappealing social media content leads to the strongest reduction in ratings, equivalent to the value of nine years of on-the-job experience. These findings persist across participant pools, including both the general public and experienced recruiters, highlighting social media's substantial and likely increasing role in the hiring process.

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Monitoring Decreases Discrimination (joint with Edmund Baker and Veronika Grimm, revise and resubmit, Economic Inquiry)

Evidence on ethnic discrimination is broad but ambiguous, with lab studies showing less convincing results than field studies. To investigate if monitoring accounts for this difference, we conducted an online experiment where participants pre-selected job candidates under varying conditions. We observed a minor average preference for Black candidates, but a small minority strongly discriminated against them. This discrimination vanished when participants were informed their decisions would be monitored, partially explaining the discrepancies between lab and field results.

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The Impact of Ramadan on Student Performance and Productivity: Evidence from a Field Study (submitted)

This study investigates the impact of Ramadan on student performance through a field study, revealing a significant reduction in test performance and endurance during the fasting period. 8th grade students taking their final year's test during Ramadan score 1.1 standard deviations lower than those who took the exam prior to Ramadan. The paper makes two key contributions. First, it provides evidence that the macroeconomic effect of Ramadan on productivity involves not only a reduction in hours worked but also a decrease in hourly productivity. Second, it provides well-identified evidence on the extent of performance decline in educational tests during Ramadan. These findings underscore the need to account for Ramadan's impact when scheduling important exams, even in non-Muslim countries, to prevent creating disparities between Muslim and non-Muslim students.