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Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein and Anat Vaturi | 14 mortality led to the spectacular Jewish population growth in early modern times, while their earlier investment in infant and child care, coupled with the investment in children’s education, contributed to their economic prosperity . Once Judaism became a “literate religion” ( Botticini and Eckstein, 2005 ; 2007 ; 2012 ) , whose core norm required parents to invest in their children’s care and education, enhancing their children’s cognitive skills became focal activities of Jewish households . The basic idea is as follows : Since Jewish parents could not know, in advance, which of their infants would have higher cognitive skills and physical strength ( which affected the children’s survival ) , they put a lot of care and effort to improve the health and survival of all their newborns, thus generating comparatively lower infant and child mortality rates . Our contribution to the research on human capital formation stems from provid...
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