This study examined the effects of joint academic study involving minority students from the Bedouin population in Israel with the general population on out-group and in-group trust. Using a modified version of the trust game as a serial game with complete information and 135 students from both populations in a joint academic programme, we found that the level of trust of the Bedouin students towards the general population decreases over time, despite their having assimilated into this group. We discuss the theoretical explanations and implications of this result, along with practical recommendations for introducing complementary steps to enhance trust over time between the two populations. The latter includes creating more social and academic encounters between the groups and offering better incentives for cross-sector collaboration. This study is the first to examine the development of trust over time in academia between different ethnic groups while the groups are in national conflict.

To assess the efficiency of funding policies, governments study the economic value of cultural heritage sites. Because of their unique nature, an innovative evaluative tool is proposed here – CFE – compensation for elimination – rather than the commonly used willingness to pay (WTP) or the travel cost method (TCM). CFE, based on the familiar willingness to accept (WTA), should be adopted to better reflect the non-use values attached, even unconsciously, to cultural heritage sites.

This paper investigates how democracy influences economic growth through innovation and institutional quality. Using an augmented Solow growth model and panel-data mediation analysis across 123 countries (2011–2022), we quantify democracy’s impact on GDP per capita. Our results show that institutional quality accounts for 83.3% of democracy’s total effect on economic output, while innovation explains only 16.7%. This study contributes to the literature by distinguishing between institutional and innovation channels in the democracy–growth nexus and provides policy-relevant insights for promoting inclusive economic growth (SDG 8) and building resilient infrastructure and innovation (SDG 9).

Between 2013 and 2022, the Israeli central government signed bilateral Umbrella Agreements with 37 municipalities, committing to the construction of 462,984 dwelling units to alleviate a national housing affordability crisis. While critical planning literature hypothesized that these centralized development pacts would induce municipal fiscal distress and widen spatial inequality, the realized long-term local impacts have remained empirically unexamined. Utilizing an administrative panel of 268 local authorities spanning 2000 to 2024, we evaluate the program through a continuous-dose event-study design with municipality-level block bootstrapping. Our estimates exclude adverse fiscal dislocations, demonstrating that signatory municipalities maintained stable budgetary equilibria. Specifically, the empirical results rule out post-signing increases in intergovernmental transfer dependency exceeding 2.5 percentage points, and reject erosions in the non-residential property tax share larger than 7.4 percentage points, with formal equivalence tests confirming stability across pre-specified policy bounds. For housing transaction prices, the achieved equivalence bound of 7.5% excludes large market disruptions, although the empirical design lacks the statistical resolution to detect the modest price dampening documented in localized micro-supply literature. We demonstrate that this pervasive local stability was driven by a severe implementation deficit: state audits show that actual land marketing achieved only 33% of the contractual residential pace and 7% of commercial allocations, leaving the physical mechanisms of municipal fiscal dilution largely unactivated.

Context and Objectives: This longitudinal study examined the shifting dynamics of innovation concentration, regional inequality, and internal migration in Israel from 2000 to 2020, analyzing how centralized technological growth correlates with peripheral labor mobility. Methods: Utilizing a purely observational and correlational approach, the empirical framework tracks Central Bureau of Statistics time series data regarding commuting patterns, net internal migration, and composite socioeconomic living standard indices. Main Findings: The analysis revealed a significantly increasing tendency for peripheral residents to commute to central hubs, alongside stagnant permanent internal migration and a relative decline in peripheral living standards, underscoring an increasing structural dependence on the core. Limitations: Key limitations include the reliance on aggregated national-level data up to 2020 and the absence of occupational disaggregation, which prevents isolating specific labor segments or establishing direct causal mechanisms. Policy Implications: The study suggests that market-driven integration alone is insufficient to bridge spatial gaps. Carefully tailored interventions fostering local innovation capacity and alleviating the commuter burden are required to promote sustainable and balanced regional development.