Research

Work in Progress

Breaking Barriers, Building (on) Networks: Lessons from the Jewish Emancipation in Germany

With Lukas Rosenberger and Assaf Sarid

How do minority groups respond to state-led integration? We examine the case of German Jews in the 19th century, when legal emancipation coincided with rapid industrialization. Using county-level data from Prussia, we show that while Christians shifted into industrial work, Jews specialized in service-sector professions like finance, law, and medicine. In more industrialized regions, Jewish assimilation also deepened, reflected in rising intermarriage and conversion rates. Combining these findings with new individual-level data, we investigate the relationship between occupational specialization and acculturation. A game-theoretic model suggests that historical Jewish networks, formed under exclusion, enabled both economic advantage and the maintenance of private identity in an integrating society.

Fertility, Education, and the Persistence of Son Preference

This paper models how fertility, education, and son preference coevolve during the demographic transition. Families with strong son preference have more children, continuing until a son is born, resulting in lower per-child investment in education. Because daughters are more likely to be born into larger families, this creates gender gaps in human capital without within-family bias. Over time, rising education weakens son preference, creating a feedback loop that sustains differences in fertility and gender norms. I derive testable predictions linking these dynamics to structural factors, such as returns to education, and evaluate them using historical data from the Netherlands.

Inheritance and Openness: Elite Recruitment in 19th-Century Germany

This project investigates how elite formation changed across sectors and regions in 19th-century Germany. While some elite paths—especially in the civil service—remained closed and aristocratic, others, particularly in science and industry, became more accessible as educational and economic modernization unfolded. Using biographical data from the Neue Deutsche Biographie, I reconstruct social origins, institutional ties, and professional networks to study how sectoral demands and regional legacies shaped elite reproduction. The analysis reveals how variation in openness emerged not from universal reform, but from the intersection of modernization and historical structure.

Publications

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions (Journal of Economic Growth, 2023)

With Moti Michaeli and Assaf Sarid

We develop a model in which individualism and institutions coevolve through social organization. Agents settle in either towns (where they work independently) or clans (where they coordinate collectively). Economic potential shapes town growth and institutional quality, triggering a feedback loop: larger towns foster more individualism, which strengthens institutions and draws more people. Societies thus diverge into different cultural and institutional equilibria. The model explains how early geographic and economic conditions led to persistent differences in development, and helps account for the historical divergence between China and Europe.

Paper   

Coverage: Interview at Faculti