In Switzerland, two key church institutions the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations power to shape human...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity - defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods - on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather than...

This comment makes a contribution to Becker and Woessmann's paper on a human capital theory of Protestant economic history eventually challenging the famous thesis by Max Weber who attributed economic success to a specific Protestant work ethic (Quarterly Journal of Economics 124 (2) (2009)...

Analysing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult, especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to adequately replicate the environment and the inherent biases of post event surveys. It is in this area that natural...

Algan and Cahuc in "Inherited Trust and Growth" (AER, 2010) argue that "inherited trust" is a key factor in explaining growth rates across countries. They derive a measure of inherited trust by linking respondents' "home countries" in the United States General Social Survey (1972-2004) and the...

In this study of the persistent social phenomenon of suicide, we find that even though theological and social differences between Catholicism and Protestantism have decreased, Catholics are still less likely than Protestants to commit or accept suicide. This difference remains even after we...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity – defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods – on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity - defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods - on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather than...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations power to shape human...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity - defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods - on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather than...