From Farmers to Merchants, Conversions and Diaspora: Human Capital and Jewish History

Botticini, Maristella; Eckstein, Zvi

doi:10.1162/jeea.2007.5.5.885

Cited by 160 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(24 reference statements)

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“…In particular, Botticini and Eckstein (2005, 2006 examine the cultural roots of the economic success of the Jewish population through a theory of specialization in traderelated activities. They conclude that the key factor was not the system of beliefs of the Jewish religion per se.…”

Section: Religious Beliefs and Human Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture, Entrepreneurship, and Growth

Doepke

Zilibotti

2014

Handbook of Economic Growth

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile. As a consequence, the occupational choice of entrepreneurship hinges on risk tolerance and patience. Parents expecting their children to become entrepreneurs have an incentive to instill these two values in their children. Cultural transmission is Beckerian, i.e., parents are driven by the desire to maximize their children's happiness. We also consider, in an extension, a paternalistic motive for preference transmission. The growth rate of the economy depends on the fraction of the population choosing an entrepreneurial career. How many entrepreneurs there are in a society hinges, in turn, on parental investments in children's patience and risk tolerance. There can be multiple balanced-growth paths, where in faster-growing countries more people exhibit an "entrepreneurial spirit." We discuss applications of models of endogenous preferences to the analysis of socio-economic transformations, such as the British Industrial Revolution. We also discuss empirical studies documenting the importance of culture and preference heterogeneity for economic growth. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: J20, O10, O40

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Section: Religious Beliefs and Human Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture, Entrepreneurship, and Growth

Doepke

Zilibotti

2014

Handbook of Economic Growth

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“…The amount and quality of education seem to explain most of the variation in IQ between groups and over time within groups (120). Botticini and Eckstein (121) argue that a tradition of education and literacy accounts for Jews entering jobs requiring high intellectual skills. Of course, this hypothesis and Cochran and Harpending's are not mutually exclusive.…”

Section: Current Evidence and Problems To Solvementioning

confidence: 99%

Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics

Richerson

Boyd

Henrich

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

299

199

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The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate the hypothesis that the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes. Culture normally evolves more rapidly than genes, creating novel environments that expose genes to new selective pressures. Many human genes that have been shown to be under recent or current selection are changing as a result of new environments created by cultural innovations. Some changed in response to the development of agricultural subsistence systems in the Early and Middle Holocene. Alleles coding for adaptations to diets rich in plant starch (e.g., amylase copy number) and to epidemic diseases evolved as human populations expanded (e.g., sickle cell and G6PD deficiency alleles that provide protection against malaria). Large-scale scans using patterns of linkage disequilibrium to detect recent selection suggest that many more genes evolved in response to agriculture. Genetic change in response to the novel social environment of contemporary modern societies is also likely to be occurring. The functional effects of most of the alleles under selection during the last 10,000 years are currently unknown. Also unknown is the role of paleoenvironmental change in regulating the tempo of hominin evolution. Although the full extent of culture-driven gene-culture coevolution is thus far unknown for the deeper history of the human lineage, theory and some evidence suggest that such effects were profound. Genomic methods promise to have a major impact on our understanding of gene-culture coevolution over the span of hominin evolutionary history.T he human cultural system supports the cumulative evolution of complex adaptations to local, often ephemeral environments. Using elaborate technology and depending on large bodies of cultural knowledge about plants and animals, stone-age foragers spread to a much wider range of habitats than any other mammal, from the frigid tundra in the Arctic to the arid deserts of Australia. The Polynesian outrigger canoe and the Arctic kayak are examples of the astoundingly sophisticated cultural adaptations that people have used to occupy distant corners of the globe. The forms of social organizations observed in humans are more diverse than the rest of the primate order combined. Humans constitute one of the world's most impressive adaptive radiations. We have occupied virtually every habitat on earth by using technology and social organization to generate thousands of socioeconomic systems (1, 2). Cultural Evolution and Gene-Culture CoevolutionCulture has many definitions, but for our purposes a useful one is all of the information that individuals acquire from others by a variety of social learning processes including teaching and imitation (3). Transmission fidelity is often sufficiently high for culture to act as an inheritance system (4). We commonly observe that the ideas, practices, skills, attitudes, norms, art styles, technology, ways of speaking, and other elements...

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“…3 See Botticini and Eckstein (2007) on the e¤ects of changing religious norms on literacy. 4 Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009) documents the e¤ects of genetic distance on technology di¤usion and development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Banks and Development: Jewish Communities in the Italian Renaissance and Current Economic Performance

Pascali

2016

Review of Economics and Statistics

105

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Are di¤erences in local banking development long-lasting? Do they a¤ect long-term economic performance? I answer these questions by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15th century. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities that were hosting Jewish communities developed complex banking institutions for two reasons: …rst, the Jews were the only people in Italy who were allowed to lend for a pro…t and, second, the Franciscan reaction to Jewish usury led to the creation of charity lending institutions, the Monti di Pietà, that have survived until today and have become the basis of the Italian banking system. Using Jewish demography in 1500 as an instrument, I provide evidence of (1) an extraordinary persistence in the level of banking development across Italian cities (2) large e¤ects of current local banking development on per-capita income. Additional …rm-level analyses suggest that well-functioning local banks exert large e¤ects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more e¢ cient …rms. I exploit the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541 to argue that my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular, I show that, in Central Italy, the di¤erence in current income between cities that hosted Jewish communities and cities that did not exists only in those regions that were not Spanish territories in the 16th century.JEL: O43, G21, O10

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From Farmers to Merchants, Conversions and Diaspora: Human Capital and Jewish History

Cited by 160 publications

References 23 publications

Culture, Entrepreneurship, and Growth

Culture, Entrepreneurship, and Growth

Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics

Banks and Development: Jewish Communities in the Italian Renaissance and Current Economic Performance

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