Working paper: Gidron Noam and Chiara Superti. Immigrants’ Trust in Legal Institutions: Evidence from Israel. Current version available here. ABSTRACT: This paper examines the determinants and malleability of immigrants’ trust in legal institutions, using survey evidence from Israel. While existing scholarship has focused on static comparisons across groups, we examine the process in which immigrants update their levels of trust over time. We exploit Israel’s unique naturalization policy to compare immigrants from sending countries with different quality of government and a wide range of time since immigration. Our findings are congruent with the argument that exposure to institutions of different quality – rather than deeply-held cultural legacies – shapes trust in legal institutions. Those who immigrate from more corrupt countries and at an older age also express lower levels of trust immediately following immigration. However, over time immigrants’ trust is updated until it converges with the native population’s. Immigrants who are both more highly-educated and speak the local language of the receiving country – a group that is expected to be more exposed to information about state institutions – are the first to update their levels of trust. 

Working paper: Gidron Noam and Chiara Superti. Immigrants and Compulsory Military Service: Inclusive Institutions as a Tool of Integration. (in progress, available on request. Poster here.)