A Global Analysis of of Imperfect Competition in the Banking Systems and the Latest Israeli Regulation Dealing with Market Failures. ACES Working Paper No. 3, 2007

The high concentration of the banking sector is a cross-border phenomenon that has high impact on local and global economies. This paper's main goal is to analyze the factors that impact concentration in the banking systems around the globe. The innovation of this paper is that we combined economic, "economic environment", and culture variables as explanatory variables for this analysis. We found among other things that regulation in the banking system is helpful in order to keep it competitive. We also found that when the society has more individual values rather than collective ones, its banking sector is less concentrated. In the second part of the paper we focused on the Israeli case, showing that although recent indicators of the Israeli banking system indicate a higher level of concentration and lower level of competition, it seems that the recent trend is moving toward less concentration and higher competition.

U.S.-Israel Foreign Direct Investment and Terrorism. ACES Working Paper No. 9, 2007

The Israeli economy has been subjected to a continuous flow of terror since its creation. The focus of our study is how terrorism's impacts the level of production of the high-tech sector. The two main objectives and novelties of the paper are: First our paper can be a major contribution to as yet a new subfield in applied microeconomics attempting to measure the impact of terror on economic issues like FDI and Industry output in general and that focused on the High-Tech industries. Second our research is designed to help us understand the impact of terror news, especially on U.S citizens' reactions to terror in Israel. Our terror variable isn't how many bodies or but how many negative articles regarding terror there are in leading American news paper. We focus on the volatility clustering of terror information arrivals in major US financial papers and its impact on high-tech production and FDI to Israel.

The role of cultural attributes in inequality. ACES Working Paper No. 1, 2008

This paper used cross country data in order to identify the variables that determine the inequality and poverty within countries. The main result is that culture differences have a significant role in the explanation of inequality and poverty differences between countries. Other interesting results are that globalization above a certain level contributes to inequality and poverty, and that inequality and poverty have an inverse U relation in relation to literacy.

Society's level of literacy: A cross cultural study. ACES Working Papers No. 4, 2008

In this study, the relationship between the country's level of literacy and its national culture will be explored. Cultural differences effect the way that people think and react. Culture is "the value shared amongst distinctive social groups and classes" (Soley and Pandya 2003, 206). House, et al. (2004, 57) define culture as "shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives and are transmitted across age generations." Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede (1991) considers culture to be "the collective programming of the mind. Culture is a stem of collectively held values" (Hofstede 1981, p. 240).

Market clusters for international franchising. ACES Working Papers, August 2009

While many studies of franchising have examined the organizational antecedents of internationalization, few have examined how differences among markets lead to this internationalization. Studies linking environmental factors to the companies' decision to internationalize showed that various political, social and economic factors either attract or repel international franchising investment. We build on these studies' selected variables to understand the similarities and differences among international franchising markets. Using these variables, our results show that countries divide into eight clusters with similar international franchising market characteristics. A discussion of each cluster follows with implications for franchising research.

Changing cultural clusters: A research note. ACES Working Papers, August 2009

The purpose of this research note is to investigate the changing cultural clusters that emerged between the studies of Hofstede (1970s) and GLOBE (1990s) using similar measures and overlapping countries. Our study analyzes the world's cultural clusters using two seminal and comparable cultural classifications: Hofstede and GLOBE. Four common cultural dimensions are empirically examined: individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. We use two leading methods from cluster analysis and display data in both dandrograms and pie chart forms showing the grouping of countries. Our results suggest diverging cultural typologies that transcend geography, language, and religion. Countries are engaged in selective cultural borrowing that leads to new and changing global cultural structures.

An international study on the impact of cultural factors on the prevalence of family-owned firms. ACES Working Papers, August 2010

A key question in international corporate governance is why certain in ownership types are prevalent in different countries around the world (La Prota et al., 1999). In this study, we provide an answer for the prevalence of the family-owned firms in 42 countries by examining key characteristics of culture. We show that family-ownership is positively correlated with power distance (PD), in-group collectivism (CI) and, insignificantly, with uncertainty avoidance (UA). Our study makes a contribution to the field since previous research used religion and language as umbrella constructs for culture, while we pinpoint specific cultural dimensions.

Practical Modified Gini Index. ACES Working Papers, 2012

The Gini index is the most common method for estimating the level of income inequality in countries. In this paper we suggest a simple modification that takes into account the moderating effect of in-kind government benefits. Unlike other studies that use micro level data that is rarely available for many countries or over a period of time, the proposed modified Gini index could be calculated using just the regularly available data for each country. Such data includes the original Gini coefficient, government consumption expenditures, GDP and total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP. This modified version of the Gini index allows us to calculate the level of inequality more precisely, and make better comparisons between countries and over time.