The Effect of War on Economic and Political Preferences

This paper examines whether individual preferences are stable in the face of major conflict, leveraging the October 7th war and four waves of a large-scale panel survey data collected from Jewish Israeli adults between early 2023 and late 2025. Economic preferences — including patience, risk-taking, altruism, and reciprocity — were measured using the Global Preference Survey methodology [Falk et al., QJE, 2018]. The findings show that war has weak, mostly transient effects on economic preferences but strong, persistent effects on political preferences, with respondents shifting substantially to the right across nearly all subgroups. These results are corroborated by exploiting spatial variation in exposure to war-related violence.

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