Anat Bracha

Welcome

I am an associate professor (professor chaver) at the school of business administration at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prior to joining the Hebrew University, I was a senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and an assistant professor at the Tel-Aviv University's Eitan Berglas School of Economics. I received my Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 2005, studying risk perception, two-system reasoning, and insurance decisions.

My research integrates insights from psychology into economics--both theoretically and experimentally--with an eye to public policy. Generally speaking, the topics I study fit into two categories: (1) decision-making under risk, risk perception, and motivated reasoning, and (2) relative thinking in incentives, such as status concerns and relative-pay. Among other things, my work on risk perception provides an insight as to why educational campaigns often are ineffective and may even backfire; the work on image motivation and status concerns suggests conditions under which tax breaks would be most effective to encourage adoption of environmentally-friendly technologies, as well as an additional explanation for the prolonged unemployment in the aftermath of the Great Recession in the United States. And my study on investment under negative interest rates suggests that current conditions in Europe may not lead to excess risk taking or excess investment flow from Europe to the United States.