While under communism the identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relates to risky behaviors like smoking, drinking, and...

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal health- care access as well as women's subjective well-being. Similar restrictions, also practised around the time of childbirth, are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during these phases of...

We study the potential for pleasant and cooperative contact to reduce preconceived prejudice between religious groups in the context of India. We randomly assign Hindus and Muslims into groups, in which they interact over the course of a week-long vocational training program. We find that...

This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the presence of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are less effective for speakers of languages that contain future tense marking. Consistent with this...

In "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Robert D. Woodberry (2012) claims that the emergence of stable democracies around the world was influenced by conversionary Protestantism. While Woodberry's historical analysis is exhaustive, the accompanying empirical evidence suffers from severe...

We show that Eastern Orthodox believers are less happy compared to those of Catholic and Protestant faith using data covering more than 100 countries around the world. Consistent with the happiness results, we also find that relative to Catholics, Protestants and non-believers, those of Eastern...

While under communism, identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relates to addictive behaviors like smoking, drinking and...

Institutions, defined as "the rules of the game in society", drive economic growth and prosperity. Institutions often arise from long-term processes influenced by geography, major historical events, culture, and, less commonly, religion. This chapter reviews the available evidence to demonstrate...

How does conflict exposure affect trust? We hypothesize that direct (firsthand) experience with conflict induces parochialism: trust towards out-groups worsens, but trust towards in-groups, owing to positive experiences of kin solidarity, may improve. Indirect exposure to conflict through...

We examine the gender legacy of past institutions by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the borders between the former Papal States on the one hand, and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Duchy of Modena on the other. Our results show that a century after the...