Research

Work in Progress

Networks, Modernization, and Integration: Jewish Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Germany

With Lukas Rosenberger and Assaf Sarid

This project studies how economic development and social networks jointly shaped Jewish integration in nineteenth-century Germany. Following emancipation, Jews and Christians diverged occupationally: while Christians moved into industry, Jews concentrated in commerce and increasingly entered the free professions — medicine, law, and finance — even as they became culturally more assimilated. We argue that historically dense intra-community networks gave Jews a comparative advantage in reputation-intensive professions, and that railway expansion amplified this advantage by connecting dispersed Jewish communities, on top of its general effect on market access. Entry into the professions then fostered assimilation through sustained interaction with Christians. To test this mechanism, we combine county-level occupational data, city-level marriage records, and newly digitized individual-level data from Jewish name-adoption lists to trace specialization and acculturation across space and over time.

Connections at Work: Family Ties and Career Progression in the Prussian Administration

Who gets promoted within the state, and what determines the rules governing that process? This project studies career progression in the Prussian administration during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period that culminated in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms, one of the most consequential attempts to professionalize a European civil service. Using newly constructed biographical data on administrative careers, I show that family connections shaped promotion at all ranks and shielded incumbents from displacement at the top. A within-individual design exploiting the father's death as a loss of the active component of the connection confirms that these effects reflect active patronage rather than fixed family endowments. Ongoing work extends the analysis into the post-reform period and examines whether the reforms reduced the role of connections — and whether more open recruitment translated into better administrative performance.

Preliminary draft — comments welcome.

Son Preference and the Demographic Transition

This project studies how fertility and son preference coevolve during the demographic transition. I develop a model in which families with strong son preference continue childbearing until a son is born, leading to higher fertility. As the demographic transition shifts parental investment toward quality rather than quantity, fertility differences between families with and without son preference widen, increasing the relative prevalence of the former. This compositional shift, in turn, slows the demographic transition. The model therefore predicts a weaker transition in regions where son preference is more prevalent. I test these predictions using linked U.S. census data from 1850 to 1910.

Publications

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions (Journal of Economic Growth, 2024)

With Moti Michaeli and Assaf Sarid

To unravel the roots of the relationship between the individualism–collectivism dimension of culture (IC) and market-supporting institutions, we develop a model where the two interact and coevolve. IC and institutions are related indirectly via social organization: agents settle either in the Town, a loose organization where they work independently, or in the Clan, a cohesive organization where they engage in collective work. The town’s relative economic potential positively affects the town’s size and institutional quality. A larger town then renders society more individualistic, which attracts even more agents to the town and improves its institutional quality. The resulting positive feedback loop drives societies toward different steady states. If the town’s relative economic potential is sufficiently high, the society converges to a steady state with a completely individualistic culture, high institutional quality, and a large town. Otherwise, the society converges to a steady state with a completely collectivistic culture, weak institutions, and a large clan. We conclude that contemporary IC and institutions exhibit path dependence and are thus related to the historical exogenous conditions in each region. Using current and historical data, we provide empirical evidence supporting our model. In addition, we apply the model to discuss the historical divergence between China and Europe.

Paper   

Coverage: Interview at Faculti