Abstract: This paper studies the causal effects of childhood residential location on the adult income of native-born Israeli children and the children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The causal effects of childhood location contribute substantial variability to the adult earnings of Israeli children. While the place effects of high-income immigrants and high income natives are strongly correlated, location effects for low-income immigrants are uncorrelated with location effects for low-income natives. Large, diverse cities are especially beneficial to immigrant children, while cities with high municipality welfare expenditure and crime rates tend to be detrimental to native children. Guided by these findings, we develop a policy targeting framework aiming to recommend the top locations in Israel and incorporating the constraint that the policymaker cannot make ethnicity-dependent location recommendations. Using empirical Bayes tools, we find that targeting policies based on pooled population-wide averages yield inferior outcomes for immigrants. Robust targeting strategies designed to perform well against the least favorable sorting patterns reveal a set of 5 cities that are likely to benefit children of both groups.

Abstract: This paper studies the prevalence and evolution of gender bias in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examination process and assesses the consequences of this bias on economic outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing tools to patent applications submitted between 2001 and 2013, I estimate gender gaps conditional on the content of the patent application, comparing allowance probabilities between teams of inventors with different gender compositions but similar inventions. Despite a substantial raw gender gap in the probability of initial allowance, I document that there is no average difference in initial allowance rates between mixed-gender and all-male teams. This average masks important heterogeneity. Allowance rates for mixed-gender teams were significantly lower between 2001 and 2003, a gap that shrank to zero by 2005. Gender gaps also vary substantially across examiners, with bias against mixed-gender patents concentrated among senior examiners and bias in favor of women concentrated among young examiners. A mean zero gender gap with positive variance generates economic loss due to the misallocation of granting rights. Building on the methodology of Kogan et al. (2017), I estimate that these biases depressed the value of approved patents by $12.6 million per year.

Abstract: We study the role of government transfers in alleviating the repercussions of parental employment shocks on the education outcomes of children. A comprehensive reduction in Israel's system of universal child cash benefits, cutting total government transfers to families with children by more than 30%, is shown to have adversely affected children whose parents were displaced in a mass layoff event. First, we find that children of laid-off parents suffer from lower high-school performance and are less likely to secure a matriculation certificate (Bagrut). These effects are present only in lower-income families and are inversely related to the child’s age at the time of the shock. Second, we find that cuts to child benefits at the household level exacerbate these negative effects for low-income families while leaving high-income families unaffected. Our findings suggest that cash transfers have a mitigating role in determining children's outcomes among families with low socio-economic status.

Abstract: This paper investigates gender differences in the long-term effects of job loss on workers' labor market outcomes in Israel. Relative to displaced female workers, male counterparts experience a larger drop in earnings due to unexpected job loss, despite both genders seeing similar employment declines. Pre-displacement firm and individual attributes entirely account for this gap, with the displacing firm's wage premium and female share explaining the majority of this gap. Extending the analysis beyond mean effects to distributional impacts shows that these observable characteristics account for the observed gender gap across the income distribution. Our findings underscore the significant role of firms in shaping the dynamics of labor market disparities.