We investigate if people exploit moral wiggle room in markets when revelation is stochastic and the revealed information is potentially erroneous. In our laboratory experiment, subjects purchase products associated with co-benefits represented as a contribution to carbon offsets purchased by the...

Based on data from a large-scale computer-based survey among more than 3700 German citizens, this paper empirically examines the determinants of the general change of electricity tariffs and the specific change to green tariffs. Our econometric analysis with binary probit and multinomial logit...

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...

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 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...

We ran a number of experiments among refugees and Germans.In a first step, we ask whether refugees and Germans behave differently and find that risk preferences do not significantly differ between them. However, refugees are less trusting than Germans. In a second step, we seek to identify the...