In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

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

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and whether other education motives were involved as well. We employ a historical data set from...

Using German administrative income tax data we investigate economic consequences of an increasingly secular society for prosocial behavior. For this purpose, we establish initially a simple household model to formalize the relationship between religious giving in form of the German church tax...

This contribution studies the impact of modernization on the onset of Islamist conflict. To capture the multi-dimensional phenomenon of modernization, we create a unique modernization index. Our empirical analysis for 154 countries for the 1971-2006 period provides robust evidence that...

This paper studies the effects of differences in worldviews on parents? attitudes towards their children. We use unique German survey data containing questions on worldviews, religion, parental behavior, and socioeconomic variables. Our empirical evidence suggests that people with stronger...

Using a stated choice experiment, we find that a prime that makes environmental identity salient makes people behave greener, whereas it does not if it makes religious identity salient. Further-more, we discover non-linear priming effects for environmental identity, which means that rais-ing the...

Our research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that a higher incidence of solar eclipses is associated with higher social complexity and complex thinking in premodern societies. We construct a novel dataset of solar eclipses' incidence at the ethnic-group level, bringing...

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...