Israel Eruchimovitch

Research

Working Papers

Titles, Ties, and Competence: Official Selection in the Prussian Administration

How do bureaucracies select their officials? I study the Prussian civil service of 1740–1806, often regarded as the first modern bureaucracy, using a prosopographical register of about 3,500 officials that records their credentials, family ties, careers, and their superiors' assessments. Two inherited advantages run through the service. A noble title placed unexamined men high at entry and raised promotion rates at every level of credentials, yet nobles were rated weak more often than commoners of the same rank and schooling: the title bought advancement that the service’s own judges did not endorse. A father in the civil service worked differently. Insiders brought more credentials, were promoted somewhat faster while the father lived, and fell back permanently when he died — but they were rated no worse than the commoners beside them. Inherited advantage was not one thing: one kind substituted for ability, the other came with it. Selection data can locate favoritism and describe it; whether it cost the state anything in the field is the question the next stage of the project takes up.

Draft available upon request.

Networks, Modernization, and Integration: Lessons from Jewish Emancipation in Prussia, with Lukas Rosenberger and Assaf Sarid

Railways are usually studied as a technology for moving goods, people, and ideas. We argue that they also let dispersed minorities keep social ties at a distance, and that this changed how minorities assimilated and specialized. We study Jews in nineteenth-century Prussia, combining occupation data by denomination with newly digitized marriage statistics and railway maps. Our main variable is Jewish community access — the Jewish population of other counties within a day’s journey, weighted by travel time — holding market access constant and instrumenting the railway network with a predicted one linking the fifty largest cities of 1816. Community access raised the share of Jews in law, medicine, and management, occupations where trust and reputation matter, but not in retail, transport, or industry; market access had no effect. For Christians, it did little, except where Catholics were a small minority, and there in transport and industry. In a panel of sixty cities, rising community access also raised intermarriage. Railways let Jews deploy the social capital of their network in occupations that rewarded it while assimilating outwardly: community ties and assimilation were complements, not substitutes.

Draft available upon request.

Publications

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions, with Moti Michaeli and Assaf Sarid. Journal of Economic Growth 29(3): 391–432, 2024

Paper

Work in Progress

The Making of German Chemistry, 1830–1930, with Felipe Valencia Caicedo

Accidental Heirs: Primogeniture, Human Capital, and Estate Management in Britain

Teaching

Instructor

An Introduction to Economic Growth (pre-college), Brown University — Summer 2026

Formal Reasoning and Logic (pre-college), Brown University — Summer 2025

Macroeconomics 2 (undergraduate), University of Haifa — Summer 2022

Teaching Assistant

Intermediate Macroeconomics (TA for Felipe Valencia Caicedo), Brown — Spring 2026

Intermediate Macroeconomics (TA for Kellie Forrester), Brown — Fall 2025

Introduction to Econometrics (TA for Elisa Macchi), Brown — Spring 2025

Intermediate Microeconomics (TA for Ivan Kwok), Brown — Fall 2024

Macroeconomic Theory (TA for Assaf Sarid), University of Haifa — Spring 2023

Microeconomic Theory (TA for Muhammad Mahajna), University of Haifa — Spring 2022, 2023

Intermediate Microeconomics (TA for Amnon Maltz and Shiran Rachmilevitch), University of Haifa — Spring 2018, 2022

64 Waterman St., Providence, RI 02912

israel_eruchimovitch[at]brown.edu