Purpose: Examining the linkage between self-reported ethnicity and the propensity for family-based informal health care, this study considers cultural connections to religion as a possible explanation for ethnic difference. Design and Methods: Nation-wide survey respondents (N = 2,126) were...

This study presents new evidence on individual and community-specific determinants of social trust using data from 96 villages in Bangladesh. We find perceived institutional trust to be positively correlated with stated inter-personal trust. At the same time, there is significant social distance...

This study investigated the impact of Muslim Holy Days on daily stock returns of Asian financial markets for a period of 2001-2014. These markets include Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The study has tried to isolate the effect of Gregorian calendar anomalies from Muslim Holy Days...

Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We...

This paper compares the occupational distributions in 1990 and 2000 of adult white men and women for American Jews and non-Jews, after adjusting for the changes in occupational classifications. The data are from the microdata files from the National Jewish Population Surveys (1990, 2000/01) and...

Existing research has documented the confirmation bias in the domain of politics, but relatively little research has examined the confirmation bias in religion. I developed a novel task in the religious domain and compare confirmation bias evidence to that observed in the political domain. Using...

Among leftists, predicting the end of capitalism is a favorite parlor game. For example, as a graduate student in the 2010s, I remember discovering the 1976 edition of Marx’s Capital and being struck by the introduction. Written by the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the foreword concluded that...

We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three...

We exploit information on compulsory schooling reforms in 11 European countries, implemented mostly in the 1960s and 70s, to identify the impact of education on religious adherence and religious practices. Using micro data from the European Social Survey, conducted in various years between 2002...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...