The economics of Jewish continuity

Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions, or Minorities?

“…This prompted the fast migrations of Jews from the ninth to the twelfth century to North Africa and western Europe, where they acquired high standards of living. 6 Our paper contributes to the existing and growing literature on the long-term economic outcomes of changes in social norms, cultural values, and institutions (e.g., Greif 1994;Temin 1997;Chiswick 1999;Acemoglu, Johnson, andRobinson 2001, 2002;Carlton and Weiss 2001;and Mokyr 2002). We show that contemporary economic patterns (in our case, the selection of Jews into urban, skilled jobs) have been heavily influenced by a religion reform and a change in social norms that emerged centuries ago.…”

Preserving religious identity through education: Economic analysis and evidence from the US

“…7 Private schooling and religious schooling are available as alternatives to public schooling, and can be purchased from a competitively-priced private sector at any desired quality. 8 Thus, households can choose to forgo free public education and instead purchase private or religious education.…”

“…Of course, this does not imply that spending increases in themselves are an effective strategy for improving public education (Hanushek [27,28]). 7 By holdingx and after-tax incomes fixed, we abstract from the effect of private school attendance on public school expenditure. 8 In this we neglect the fixed costs of education, which especially limit quality choice in smaller communities.…”

“…For example, Chiswick and Koutroumanes [6] showed that a typical household is four times more likely to attend private schooling when it lives in a central city than when it lives in a rural area. (5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17) is associated with the number of school-age children per household, which affects the cost of education quality relative to other spending categories. In theory, the price of education has two conflicting effects on the demand for private and Catholic schooling.…”

“…Our basic assumption that parents use education to preserve the religious identity of their children is grounded in the extensive literature on religious choice, which shows that religion-specific capital formation plays a key role in determining adherence to a particular religious group, and that people with greater amounts of religion-specific human capital are more capable of appreciating and producing religious commodities of that specific group (Greeley [23], Iannaccone [30,31,33], Chiswick [7], Durkin and Greeley [12]). Furthermore, since most religious capital is group-specific (denominations differ from one another), adults generally adopt the religious values of the denomination to which they were exposed in their childhood (Iannaccone [33]).…”