Prof. Avia Spivak
Avia Spivak is Chairman of The Center for Pension, Insurance and Financial Literacy. Professor Spivak was a co-founder of the program for economics and a senior fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He served as a Deputy Governor of the Bank of Israel during 2002-2006 and was in charge of significant reforms in Financial Stability, the payment system as well as others. He served as Chair of the Economics Department and Dean of The Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, as well as the president of the Israel Economic Association.
Prof. David Leiser
Prof. David Leiser is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Geneva, where he was research assistant to Jean Piaget. He specializes in economic psychology and served as President of the Division of Economic Psychology at the International Society of Applied Psychology (IAAP) and of the International Association for Economic Psychology (IAREP). He investigates how lay understanding economic and financial concepts affects behavior.
Prof. Rami Yosef
Prof. Rami Yosef is Full Professor of Finance and Actuarial Science, he is the head of the Insurance and Finance Specialty in the Department of Business Administration and also is the President (Fellow and member) of Israel Association of Value Estimations and Financial Actuaries (F.IL.A.V.F.A., CFV). Prof. Yosef is considered an expert in actuarial science and has provided expert opinions on actuarial and financial matters in legal disputes. In addition, he has served as a consultant to the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Israel, insurance company pension funds and law firms.
Dr. Sarit Menahem-Carmi
Dr. Sarit Menahem-Carmi is the Academic Director of The Center for Pension, Insurance and Economic Psychology. Her research expertise is the Israeli economy mainly focusing on the aspects of pension systems, capital markets, and labor productivity. Her dissertation examined the impact of financial media on provident fund consumers and its contribution to efficient credit allocation. Related research projects examined the application of the Compulsory Pension Law for wage-earners in 2008 with respect to the predicted replacement rate for the current workforce and cross-country comparisons of pension systems (first and second pillar).
Dr. Eyal Carmel
Dr. Carmel holds a Master’s degree in Social Psychology and a Ph.D. Both from the department of Psychology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Eyal’s dissertation studied the influence of financial literacy on financial behavior, a topic in which he published several papers in academic journals and books. Today Eyal works at the Israeli administration for public transportation. In his role he combines ideas from behavior research with methods of Big Data analysis to support planning and improved the service level of public transportation.
Research
colleagues
Tal Hefling
Tal Hafling, Adv.
Tal Hafling, Adv., researches financial regulation and Israel's pension system, focusing on institutional entities and fiduciary duties. She holds an LL.B., B.A. in Management, and M.A. in Public Policy from TAU, and is writing her Ph.D. under Prof. Avia Spivak and Prof. Adi Ayal. A partner at Shibolet & Co., she previously served as a senior advisor at the Capital Market Authority and held senior legal roles in leading financial bodies and fintechs.
Email: christal.ludmir@gmail.com
Prof. Aviad Tur-Sinai
Prof. Aviad Tur-Sinai is a Full Professor at the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa. He specializes in research on welfare and health economics, economics of the elderly, and labor economics. Today he is a principal investigator at the Minerva Center on Intersectionality in Aging (MCIA), and a research associate at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies.
Prof. Haim Kedar-Levy
Prof. Levy is an associate professor in the faculty of Business and Management, at Ben Gurion University. His research addresses theoretical and empirical functioning of financial markets. Published theoretical and empirical papers in leading finance journals, some won prestigious awards.
Dr. Yaron Lahav
Dr. Yaron Lahav is a senior lecturer of finance in the Department of Business Administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research is mainly based on behavioral and experimental finance, expectations formation, and decision making.
Omer Selivansky Eden
Omer is a researcher at the Center for Governance and the Economy in the Israel Democracy Institute. His research interests include Behavioural Insights in Public Policy, Soft Regulatory Tools and Education Reforms. Omer holds an M.A in Economics from Ben Gurion University.
Yoav Gafni
Yoav is a former deputy the manager of the capital market, insurance and savings authority. He was responsible for licensing, institutional investment regulation, insurance agents and financial services regulation in the authority. He holds
M.A in economics from Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Yair Kochav
Dr. Kochav research focus in long time saving and pension schemes. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Yair studied the possible emergence of a “Dutch disease” due to the high-tech sector in Israel, and looked for possible solution using pension savings as a government-backed risk insurance.
Dr. Sarit Saban
Dr. Sarit Saban has completed PhD in psychology studies at the Department of Psychology at Ben Gurion University. She is a certified clinical psychologist. Sarit's doctoral dissertation deals with the mapping of maladaptive economic behaviors to familiar personality traits.
Shenhav Malul
Shenhav Malul is a PhD student at the Department of Business Administration at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her main areas of expertise are: taxes, accounting, pensions and actuary.
Sharona Tasdok-Rosenbluth, ph.D
Dr. Sharona Tsadok-Rosenbluth, CPA, is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Health Policy and Management. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Ben-Gurion University and completed accounting studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her research focuses on public and private long-term care insurance, international models, and healthcare financing for aging populations. She is currently completing her postdoc at the Hebrew University.
Email: stsadok@gmail.com
Research
students
Tanya Meir-Frog
Tanya Meir-Frog is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Business Administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She holds an investment counseling license from the Israel Securities Authority and a pension license from the Capital Market, Insurance and Savings Authority. Her research focuses on mapping structural flaws in Israel's pension system and exploring avenues for their repair and improvement.