Jews at Work: Their Economic Progress in the American Labor Market

by Barry R. Chiswick

Overview

This book addresses the educational, occupational, and income progress of Jews in the American labor market. Using theoretical and statistical findings, it compares the experience of American Jews with that of other Americans, from the middle of the 19th century through the 20th and into the early 21st century.

Jews in the United States have been remarkably successful; from peddlers and low-skilled factory workers, clearly near the bottom of the economic ladder, they have, as a community, risen to the top of the economic ladder. The papers included in this volume, all authored or co-authored by Barry Chiswick, address such issues as the English language proficiency, occupational attainment and earnings of Jews, educational and labor market discrimination against Jews, life cycle and labor force participation patterns of Jewish women, and historical and methodological issues, among many others. The final chapter analyzes alternative explanations for theconsistently high level of educational and economic achievement of American Jewry over the past century and a half.

The chapters in this book also develop and demonstrate the usefulness of alternative techniques for identifying Jews in US Census and survey data where neither religion nor Jewish ethnicity is explicitly identified. This methodology is also applicable to the study of other minority groups in the US and in other countries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030412425
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/17/2020
Series:	Studies of Jews in Society , #2
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	339
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Barry R. Chiswick is Professor of Economics and of International Affairs at the George Washington University and a Research Fellow at IZA Institute of Labor Economics and at GLO Global Labor Organization. He is a former Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has received numerous honors for his research, including Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa from Lund University (Sweden) a Fulbright Foundation Research Fellowship, the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Carleton C. Qualey Article Award from the Immigration History Society, and the Marshall Sklare Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. His research has been published in journals in Economics, Sociology, History, Demography, Jewish Studies, and Socio-linguistics.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction.- PART I. Turn of the 20^th Century.- Chapter 2. The Billings Report and the Occupational Attainment of American Jewry, 1890.- Chapter 3. Jewish Immigrant Skill and Occupational Status at the Turn of the Century.- Chapter 4. Jewish Immigrant Wages in America in 1909: An Analysis of the Dillingham Commission Data.- PART II. Across the 20^th Century.- Chapter 5. The Occupational Attainment and Earnings of American Jewry, 1890 to 1990.- Chapter 6. The Occupational Attainment of American Jewry: 1990 to 2000.- Chapter 7. Differences in Education and Earnings Across Racial and Ethnic Groups.- Chapter 8. Labor Supply and Investment in Child Quality: A Study of Jewish and Non-Jewish Women.- Chapter 9. The Linguistic and Economic Adjustment of Soviet Jewish Immigrants in the United States: 1980 to 2000 (Michael Wenz).- PART III. Immigrant Adjustment in Israel.- Chapter 10. Mass Migration and Income Inequality in Israel.- Chapter 11. Hebrew Language Usage: Determinants and Effects on Earnings Among Immigrants in Israel.- Chapter 12. The Effect of Linguistic Distance and Country of Origin on Immigrant Language Skills: Application to Israel (Michael Beensk and Gaston L. Repetto).- PART IV. Methodological Issues.- Chapter 13. The Economics of the Diaspora Revised (Elliezer Ayal).- Chapter 14. A Method for Proxying a Respondent’s Religious Background: An Application to School Choice Decisions (Stella Koutroumanes Hofrenning).- Chapter 15. Testing the Immigrant Assimilation Hypothesis with Longitudinal Data (Michael Beensk and Ari Paltiel).- PART V. Contemporary Jewish Issues.- Chapter 16. Russian Jewish Immigrants in the United States: The Adjustment of Their English Language Proficiency and Earnings in the American Community Survey (Nicholas Larsen).- Chapter 17. The Rise and Fall of the American Jewish PhD.- Chapter 18. The Earnings of American Jewish Men: Human Capital, Denomination and Religiosity (Jidong Huang).- Chapter 19. An Economic Analysis of Philanthropy.- Chapter 20. The Cost of Living Jewishly and Jewish Continuity (Carmel U. Chiswick).- PART VI. Conclusion.- Chapter 21. The Economic Progress of American Jewry: From Eighteenth Century Merchants to Twenty-First Century Professionals.- Chapter 22. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Outcomes: Why the Jews Flourished in America.- Chapter 23. American Jewish Economic Attainment: Prospects for the Future.

Editorial Reviews

Jews at Work is a thought-provoking book that includes a wealth of new hypotheses, carefully conducted statistical tests, and creative innovations on both the theoretical and empirical analysis fronts. … the writing is crystal clear. The key ideas and findings are eminently accessible to a wider set of readers.” (Evelyn L. Lehrer, Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 43 (1), 2023)

“Chiswick’s work is broad in scope.” (Paul Burstein, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 33, 2023)

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