Working papers:


Awarded finalist for the MinE Best Paper Award

Does competition always mitigate the impact of discrimination on racial wage gaps? This paper examines the impact of product market competition on customer-driven taste-based discrimination in a service economy characterized by homophily. I develop a novel equilibrium model of both product and labor markets in which heightened product market competition tends to exacerbate labor market discrimination in customer-facing occupations. Intensified competition compels firms to reduce prices while also prioritizing the preferences of wealthier demographic groups when the service product is a normal good. This results in widening wage and employment gaps between the privileged demographic groups and others in the service sector. I validate the predictions of the model in the context of intensified competition in the US banking sector, triggered by bank deregulation. I find that wage and employment gaps between Black and White workers in the banking sector widened post-deregulation precisely in client-facing occupations and in states with higher levels of racial animosity.



I study how insurers assess risk, set premiums, and determine coverage in unregulated selection markets. The analysis draws on unique granular administrative panel data from one of Israel’s largest commercial auto insurers, directly observing internal pricing and coverage decisions. I document that pricing and coverage patterns in this market deviate from standard cost-based benchmarks. Surprisingly, premiums respond weakly to expected costs, while coverage denials are frequent and sensitive to expected costs. Using a theoretical and structural analysis, I show that these patterns, often attributed to adverse selection, are instead driven by market power, fixed costs, and the insurers' overweighting of noisy risk signals. Market power and supply-side frictions distort insurance provision, disproportionately harming high-cost, small clients with volatile risk profiles.




This paper studies the difference between insuring a quality uncertain good and a monetary loss. I integrate key insights from the pre-owned market into the analysis of the demand for insurance. I find that adverse selection in the resale market results in a missing insurance market. There’s a gap between the insured vehicle and the resale market’s quality, especially for new vehicles. As a result, clients over-insure their quality uncertain goods, yet demand drops over the vehicle life cycle. The partial compensation further amplifies over-insurance patterns driven by behavioral attributes. The gap results in time-trends; As the vehicle ages, demand drops, the insurance market is more adversely selected, and moral hazard increases. The incomplete compensation can explain why the demand for insurance is context-dependent, why customers over-insure limited risk, in general, and why they over-insure durable goods, in particular. 




This paper is the first to examine behavioral frictions on the supply side of insurance markets. I use comprehensive administrative data, including novel     internal grading documents, from one of the largest Israeli commercial auto insurers, an affiliate of a multinational insurance company. I show that premiums barely adjust to expected costs based on vehicle age, yet respond strongly to recent claims despite their limited predictive power. When informed of these mispricing patterns, the insurer revised its pricing scheme. Analysis of the grading documents reveals that the insurer systematically overweights the informativeness of recent performance and treats vehicle age in a binary way, reacting only when vehicles are old. These supply-side behavioral frictions mainly harm disadvantaged customers, particularly small, high-volatility owners of older vehicles.



Papers in progress:



This paper develops a unified model of competition in product and labor markets. The central result is that the effect on wages depends on the source of product-market competition. When entry barriers fall, both consumers and workers benefit as markups and markdowns decline. By contrast, when technology reduces consumer transaction costs, markups fall but markdowns rise. Firms exit, competition for labor weakens, and surplus shifts from workers to consumers. I test these predictions using U.S. banking deregulations that lowered geographic barriers and local protectionism. Combining branch balance-sheet data with worker-level employment and earnings, I show that deregulation reduced the number of banks, increased concentration, lowered employment, and raised markdowns for bank-specific occupations. The evidence is consistent with transaction-cost reductions as the driving force.





Economic theory highlights the central role of transport costs: distance to markets is a major barrier to exchange, and one of the most effective impediments to trade. This paper asks whether distance similarly acted as a barrier in the implementation of mass murder during the Holocaust. I develop a simple framework to conceptualize, identify, and empirically evaluate the causal impact of railway proximity and transport facilities on Jewish mortality following the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Drawing on microdata from more than 300 Jewish communities across six European countries—covering approximately 1.5 million victims— matched with data on the 1940s European railway network. Railway proximity significantly increased mortality: distance and station access account for about one-third of cross-community variation in survival.