Informing
Policy
for Progress

The quality of Israeli academic institutions: what the wages of graduates tell about it?

Higher education in Israel expanded rapidly in the last ten years with the opening of academic colleges. This study examines the return on education, in terms of salaries, of first degree graduates from colleges compared with that of university graduates, controlling for cognitive abilities and socioeconomic characteristics. The use of Propensity Score Matching shows that […]

Energy efficiency in Ein Harod Ihud

The work was prepared as part of the Ein Harod Echud project – Kibbutz Yerok. The purpose of the work was to examine ways to save/reduce energy costs in the group and to propose cost-saving measures that include the use of alternative energies, while meeting the criteria of economic viability. The initial report focused on […]

Investment Policies in Defense R&D Programs

Investment in advanced defense technologies is a prominent characteristic of modern armed forces. The paper examines the optimal investment policy in developing such technologies, accounting for their S-shaped progress profile and the stochastic nature of the R&D process. We show that the optimal investment is a discontinuous function of the available budget, and that its […]

Reclaiming the Dead Sea, Alternatives for Action

The Dead Sea, the lowest and saltiest sea in the world, is currently in a state of severe environmental degradation. Water extraction from the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, and the Yarmouk River for Israel, Jordan, and Syria, as well as the extraction of Dead Sea water for industrial plants in Israel and Jordan, […]

Proceedings of the International Conference:

This volume contains the papers presented at an international colloquium entitled “Transition to Mass Higher Education – International Comparisons & Perspectives” which took place at the Samuel Neaman Institute at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel on December 5-6, 2004. In addition to the full papers, the volume also contains the questions and answers following each paper, […]