שחיקה מסובסדת של הון אנושי: ממצאים מן המגזר החרדי בישראל

תקציר

In recent decades there was a puzzling steep decline in Israeli Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men’s formal education level, which coincided with a sharp drop in their employment rate, and a significant rise in the attendance rate and duration of study in religious colleges (Yeshivot). To explain these unusual trends, I develop an overlapping-generations model in which the children’s formal education level depends on the parent’s labor choices which are affected by the actions of the Haredi community leadership. The leadership’s stated goal is to maximize the amount of religious studies, using state subsidies that are obtained through political leverage. It is thus optimal for the leadership to hinder the development of human capital and lower Haredi boys’ future earning potential. This lowers the future costs of stipends to Torah scholars – and frees funds that can then be used to persuade additional, less adherent individuals to opt for a lifestyle of religious studies. Differing from Berman’s (2000) (closed) club approach, this setup allows for an expanding community/club – which appears to be a better fit to the empirical evidence. The model shows that even a very small subsidy to religious studies (when used efficiently) is sufficient to induce a substantial decline in formal education rates and a further decline in the following periods. In line with the empirical evidence, the model correctly predicts strong intergenerational transmission of education patterns among the Ultra-Orthodox, but also accurately predicts a reversal of trends given a sufficiently high rate of population growth.