Kibbutz Research

Kibbutz were socialist communitarian / communal settlements in Israel. Uusally based on equal sharing of income and communal ownership of property.

Lot of good economic research by Abramitzky:

Most of this downloadable from https://people.stanford.edu/ranabr/research
- Excellent summary presentation: http://eml.berkeley.edu//~saez/course/Abramitzky_book_presentation.pdf
“Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality-Incentives Trade-Off,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25:1, 185-208, Winter 2011 2.
“On the (lack of) Stability of Communes: An Economic Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion (edited by Rachel McCleary), Oxford University Press, Chapter 9, 169-189, 2011 3.
“The Effect of Redistribution on Migration: Evidence from the Israeli kibbutz,” Journal of Public Economics, 93, 498-511, 2009 4.
“The Limits of Equality: Insights from the Israeli Kibbutz,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123:3, 1111-1159, August 2008 5.
“The Limits of Equality: An Economic Analysis of the Israeli Kibbutz,” Journal of Economic History, 67(2), 495-499, 2007 6.
“How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistribution Policies and in Returns?” with Victor Lavy [current draft: April 2012]

One nice excerpt from JEH article (summary of his dissertation):

If insurance is valuable and the sharing-rule can be adjusted to mitigate brain-drain, then why is not the entire world a Kibbutz? And, why are all Kibbutzim relatively small? One answer is that social ties between members are important in mitigating the moral hazard problem and facilitating insurance. Interestingly, membership size does not affect a Kibbutz’s likelihood to shift away from equal-sharing. At a first glance, this finding may suggest that the shirking problem is not a driving force in Kibbutzim’s commitment to equal-sharing; otherwise, larger Kibbutzim, where monitoring is more difficult, would be more likely to shift away from equal-sharing. However, all Kibbutzim have fewer than 1,200 members, so they may be equally effective in monitoring and in mitigating the shirking problem. The lack of privacy that is a by-product of the monitoring may explain why not everyone wishes to live in a Kibbutz.

Colophon

Originally posted in June 2016 on old Art / Earth / Tech discourse:

https://artearthtech.discoursehosting.net/t/kibbutz-research/71