Iannaccone’s (1991) seminal paper assigns basic market principles to the market for religion. Ina competitive market with high religious diversity the level of overall religiosity should increase. TheSecularization Hypothesis suggests that the establishment of new churches casts doubt on the...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel dataafter controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happinesscan be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A risein income causes an...