May 13, 2010

"Economics and Religion"

Prof. Carmel Chiswick

Carmel Chiswick is Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to her important contributions on the economics of Judaism, she has written extensively on the economic aspects of household work, family formation, the impact of immigrants, the emergence of professional occupations, and religion. She has worked with economists at several Israeli universities and has written extensively about economic issues related to the Jewish population.

21 December 2009

"Monetary Economics and Jewish Thought"

Dr. Daniel Schiffman, Ariel University Center

Dr. Daniel Schiffman received his B.A. at New York University and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Shattered Rails, Ruined Credit: Financial Fragility and Railroad Operations in the Great Depression," was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize of the Economic History Association, for best dissertation in the economic history of North America. Dr. Schiffman specializes in economic history and the history of economic thought. He has published a number of studies on the evolution of monetary doctrine in Jewish religious thought, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century.

7 June 2009 at 7:00 pm at JIMS' office (Yitzchak Elchanan 2)

"Man's Will and the Idea of Property Law in Jewish Law"

Joseph Isaac Lifshitz

Joseph Isaac Lifshitz is a senior fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Politics, and Religion at the Shalem Center. He received his rabbinical ordination from Rabbis Yitzhak Kulitz and David Nesher. He holds an MA in Jewish history from Touro College and is pursuing a PhD in Jewish thought from Tel Aviv University. His areas of research include Talmud, Jewish law, Jewish history, and political theory. He is also the principal of the Rabbi Yitzhak Yechiel Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

29 March 2009 at 7:00 pm at JIMS' office (Yitzchak Elchanan 2)

"Farmers to Merchants: Religion, Human Capital, and Jewish History (1-1492 CE)"

Zvika Eckstein, Tel Aviv University, Department of Economics and Deputy Governor at the Bank of Israel

Zvi Eckstein received his PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1981. He is currently Professor of Economics at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University, and Deputy Governor at the Bank of Israel. Professor Eckstein has published numerous articles in leading journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Monetary Economics and the European Economic Review.

Professor Eckstein will present his paper: "Farmers to Merchants: Religion, Human Capital, and Jewish History (1-1492 CE)" . From the end of the second century CE, Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies ( 2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions of Jews that account for a share of the reduction from 4.5 to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the urbanization in the Abbasid empire in the Near East (8th and 9th centuries) and they did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education as a precondition for the mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora within the Muslim Empire and later to Western Europe. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm, and hence converted, as it had happened centuries earlier.

21 December 2008 at 7:00 pm at JIMS' office (Yitzchak Elchanan 2)

"Talmud on Transitivity"

Professor Uzi Segal, Boston College, USA

Uzi Segal completed his PhD in Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984. Currently, he is a Professor of Economics at Boston College. He has published studies in leading economics journals such as Econometrica, the Journal of Game Theory and the Journal of Economic Theory.

Professor Segal will present his paper "Talmud on Transitivity": Transitivity is a fundamental axiom in Economics that appears in consumer theory, decision under uncertainty, and social choice theory. While the appeal of transitivity is obvious, observed choices sometimes contradict it. This paper shows that treatments of violations of transitivity already appear in the rabbinic literature, starting with the Mishnah and the Talmud (1st5th c CE). This literature offers several solutions that are similar to those used in the modern economic literature, as well as some other solutions that may be adopted in modern situations. We analyze several examples. One where nontransitive relations are acceptable; one where a violation of transitivity leads to problems with extended choice functions; and a third where a nontransitive cycle is deliberately created (to enhance justice).

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CSJE Inaugural Lecture, 9 November 2008 at 7:00 pm at JIMS' office (Yitzchak Elchanan 2)

"Economics in the Talmud"

Nobel Laureate in Economics Professor Robert Aumann, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Robert Aumann was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1930, to a well-to-do orthodox Jewish family. Fleeing Nazi persecution, he emigrated to the United States with his family in 1938, settling in New York. In the process, his parents lost everything, but nevertheless gave their two children an excellent Jewish and general education. Aumann attended Yeshiva elementary and high schools, got a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1950, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1955.

He joined the mathematics department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956, and has been there ever since. In 1990, he was among the founders of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University, an interdisciplinary research center, centered on Game Theory, with members from over a dozen different departments, including Business, Economics, Psychology, Computer Science, Law, Mathematics, Ecology, Philosophy, and others.

Aumann is the author of well over eighty research papers and six books, and has held visiting positions at Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Louvain, Stanford, Stony Brook, and NYU. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the British Academy, and the Israel Academy of Sciences; holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Chicago, Bonn, Louvain, City University of New York, and Bar Ilan University; and has received numerous prizes, including the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2005.

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