Abstract
This chapter analyzes the determinants of the earnings of American Jewish men using the 2000/01 National Jewish Population Survey. Non-response to the question on earnings is analyzed. Earnings are related to conventional human capital variables, as well as Jewish-specific variables. The standard human capital variables have similar effects for Jews and the general population. Jewish day schooling as a youth enhances earnings. Earnings vary by denomination, with Conservative Jews earning the most. The effect on earnings of religiosity (measured by synagogue attendance) is not monotonic. Earnings are highest for those who attend only once a week, as distinct from those who attend more frequently or less frequently.
This is a revision of the original article published in Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 47(4), December 2008, pp. 694–709, co-authored with Jidong Huang.
We appreciate the comments on an earlier draft from Paul Burstein, Carmel U. Chiswick, Danny Cohen-Zada, Roberta Farber, Allan Glicksman, Robert Goldfarb, Allan Kensky, Evelyn Lehrer, Uzi Rebhun, and William Sander. The data under study are from the NJPS, 2000/200I that was sponsored by the United Jewish Communities and is distributed by the North American Jewish Data Bank (www.jewishdatabank.org).
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Notes
- 1.
For recent research regarding Jewish men and women, see, for example, this volume Parts I and II, Chiswick (1988, 1993, 1999, 2007), Burstein (2007), Lehrer (2006, 2010), and Lieberson and Waters (1988), and the references therein. The comparison with other whites is appropriate. Of the male Jewish respondents in the 2000/2001 NJPS, 97 percent report their race as white. This is consistent with the racial distribution of Jews in the General Social Survey, 96 percent white non-Hispanic, 1 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, and 1 percent Asian (Smith 2005, p. 287).
- 2.
The NJPS 2000/2001 data and descriptions of the data and methodology are available from the North American Data Bank at http://www.jewishdatabank.org
- 3.
For an analysis of the occupational distribution and self-employment of American Jewish men in the 1990 and 2000/2001 NJPS in comparison to non-Jewish white men in the U.S. Census, see Chiswick (2007).
- 4.
- 5.
Most male respondents in the NJPS reported only one type of Jewish education. Of the 3111 respondents who reported receiving Jewish education in Grades 1–7, only 358 (11 percent) reported a second type, 57 reported a third type and 6 reported four types. For Grades 8–12, of the 1591 respondents who received Jewish education, only 75 (5 percent) reported a second type, 10 a third type, and 2 a fourth type. Source: NJPS, 2000/2001.
- 6.
In an analysis of the effects of attending a Catholic secondary school among young adult men, Neal (1997) finds that it increases the probability of completing high school and college among whites and minorities. Controlling for schooling level, it has a positive but statistically insignificant effect on the wages of white men, but a large positive and highly significant effect for black and Hispanic men. Neal (1997) speculates that the large wage effect is due to the higher quality of the Catholic schools than the urban public schools that the minorities would otherwise attend. This interpretation would not be relevant for explaining the higher earnings of Jews who attended Jewish day schools. The Jews who did not go to day schools for their high school education attended public secondary schools, primarily in the suburbs or in middle-income urban neighborhoods, and not in low-income, low-quality of education urban areas.
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Chiswick, B.R., Huang, J. (2020). The Earnings of American Jewish Men: Human Capital, Denomination and Religiosity. In: Chiswick, B. (eds) Jews at Work. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_15
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