This paper examines whether terrorism is an effective tool for achieving political goals. By exploiting geographic variation in terror attacks in Israel from 1988 to 2006, we show that local terror attacks cause Israelis to be more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians....

The twelfth century rabbinic scholar Maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40. This same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in Israeli public schools today. Maimonides' rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental...

In May 1991 fifteen thousand Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centers across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of...