*This paper examines the impact of socio-political uncertainty on marriage markets, focusing specifically on Muslim marital payments. Previous research shows how economic shocks influence marriage markets by altering marital transfers and matching patterns. However, the role of Muslim marital payments, that are transferred diectly to the bride - prompt dower (paid by the husband upon marriage) and deferred dower (payable upon divorce or widowhood) - remains underexplored. Using the Egyptian Arab Spring uprisings (2011-2014) as a case study, I analyze how exposure to violent protests influenced these payments in a context characterized by limited inheritance rights for women and strong traditional norms governing marriage. I hypothesize that violent protests and regime changes disrupt traditional marriage arrangements by heightening uncertainty and shifting perceptions of the risks associated with marriage, especially for women. Leveraging a novel dataset that harmonizes multiple waves of the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey (2006, 2012, 2018), I employ both a difference-in-differences approach and an event-study, to compare women married before and after 2011, exploiting geographic variation in exposure to protest-related fatalities. The results reveal that while prompt dower remains unaffected, increased exposure to deadly protests increases promised deferred dower for women married after 2011, particularly during the post-coup period of heightened social polarization. This suggests that the instability and high death toll during this period led to greater demand for financial protection against widowhood, a trend amplified by a decline in female educational attainment during the revolution.

**This preliminary paper investigates the diffusion of firms across a technological space as a result of their directed research efforts. As a first step, patent-matched Compustat data documents the increase in technological concentration among firms using patent portfolio similarities. Next, it shows a positive correlation between firm markups and their technological similarities. Furthermore, using a direct product similarity measure, the paper shows a robust positive relationship between markups and technological similarities, which contrasts with the standard theory of competition and markups. The paper proposes an alternative mechanism where this coincided rise in markups and technological concentration can be explained by firms’ directed research efforts toward high markup-generating technologies. A preliminary sketch of the model, in which firms dynamically choose between different innovations, provides insight into this potential mechanism.