Economic studies of religion tend to focus on religious affiliation and attendance at religious services to the exclusion of other dimensions of religion, including religious belief. We address this lacuna, using data from the World Values Survey to construct an index of religious beliefs based on whether an individual believes in God, heaven, hell, an immortal soul, and the afterlife. Following the approach in a seminal article, we compare the roles of religious beliefs and attendance in determining economic values related to cooperation, patriarchy, institutional trust, lawfulness, thrift, markets, and market fairness. Controlling for denominational, country and period fixed effects and a set of individual-level characteristics, we find that religious beliefs matter for six of these seven values, relative to five for attendance. In addition, beliefs are more important than attendance for promarket and patriarchal values and less important for thrift, market fairness, lawfulness, and institutional trust. We also consider the relationships between beliefs, attendance, and economic values for eight religious’ affiliations: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, other religions, and non-religious. Taken together, beliefs and attendance are most important for patriarchal values, promarket attitudes, lawfulness, and institutional trust. Relative to attendance, beliefs matter most for patriarchal attitudes and least for institutional trust. Our results suggest that religious beliefs constitute an important dimension of religious life. An exclusive focus on attendance may understate the role of religion in economic values.

While the Chinese government's stated position is to support religious freedom, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is officially atheist. Individuals who profess faith are typically unable to join and members who practice a religion face expulsion and a loss of benefits. This paper analyzes the extent to which the CCP's policies regarding religion may influence religious identification over the life cycle in China. To do so, we contrast changes in religious affiliation before and after retirement for CCP members and non-CCP members. We find a significant increase of religious activities and religious faith in CCP members after retirement – suggesting: (1) people's acknowledgment of religious belief is significantly influenced by CCP regulations and (2) the biggest influence from a material benefits perspective occurs for those CCP members employed in the Chinese government system.

I examine the impact of diversity (ethnic and religious fractionalization and polarization) on banking stability in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using data from 1996 to 2014, I employ the system Generalized Method of Moments (sys-GMM) approach to examine this relationship. I find that countries in SSA are more polarized religiously than they are ethnically. The region is, however, more ethnically fractionalized than they are religiously. Further, I conjecture that banks in more heterogeneous societies will experience poor asset quality and lower stability. I however postulate that banks offset the risks from diversity at certain levels of net interest margin (NIM). I provide empirical evidence to support these conjectures. I find varying threshold NIM values for each diversity indicator depending on the stability measure used. Opening up the banking system to foreign entry can help offset the negative impact of diversity on banking stability. Policy implications are discussed.

The paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd came up with a classification of family types and argued that the historically prevalent family types in a society have important consequences for its economic, political, and social development. Here, we evaluate Todd's most important predictions empirically. Relying on a parsimonious model with exogenous covariates, we find mixed results. On the one hand, authoritarian family types are, in stark contrast to Todd's predictions, associated with increased levels of the rule of law and innovation. On the other hand, and in line with Todd's expectations, communitarian family types are linked to racism, low levels of the rule of law, and late industrialization. Countries in which endogamy is frequently practiced also display an expectedly high level of state fragility and weak civil society organizations.

This paper investigates the long-term impact of historical missionary activity on HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, missionaries were the first to invest in modern medicine in the region. On the other hand, Christianity influenced sexual beliefs and behaviors that affect the risk of contagion. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant and Catholic missions in the early 20th century, as well as the health facilities they invested in, that we combine with individual-level Demographic and Health Survey data. With these data, we can address separately these two channels, within regions close to historical missionary settlements. First, we show that proximity to historical missionary health facilities decreases the likelihood of HIV; persistence in healthcare provision and safer sexual behaviors in the region explain this result. Second, we show that regions close to historical missionary settlements exhibit higher likelihood of HIV. This effect is driven by the Christian population in our sample. This suggests conversion to Christianity as a possible explanatory channel. Our findings are robust to alternative specifications addressing selection.

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of segregation by literacy. Regression analyses with county-fixed effects show that a larger share of Protestants is associated with higher literacy rates across all location types. A larger share of Jews relative to Catholics is not significantly associated with higher literacy in towns, but it is in villages and manors. Finally, a larger share of Jews is associated with lower fertility in towns, which is not explained by differences in literacy.

We assess the numeracy (age heaping) of religious minorities, particularly Jews, and other defendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and compare it with the general Iberian population. Our database includes 13,000 individuals who took part in Inquisition trials, and 17,000 individuals recorded in censuses and parish registers who serve as a control group. We thoroughly discuss the representativeness of our samples for the populations we aim to capture. Our results point at a substantial numeracy advantage of the Judaism-accused over the Catholic majority. Furthermore, Catholic priests and other groups of the religious elite who were occasional targets of the Inquisition had a similarly high level of numeracy.

Total fertility in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe has dropped to remarkably low rates (=1.4) despite continuing low rates female labor force participation and high historic fertility. We model three ways in which religion affects the demand for children – through norms, market wages, and childrearing costs. We estimate these effects using new panel data on church attendance and clergy employment for 13 European countries from 1960 to 2000, spanning the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Using nuns per capita as a proxy for service provision, we estimate fertility effects on the order of 300 to 400 children per nun. Moreover, nuns outperform priests as a predictor of fertility, suggesting that changes in childrearing costs dominate changes in theology and norms. Reduced church attendance also predicts fertility decline, but only for Catholics, not for Protestants. Service provision and attendance complement each other, a finding consistent with club models of religion.