Happiness and transition...................................................................................................... 3

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19 th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We find that Protestants ’ higher literacy can account for the whole gap in economic prosperity. Results hold when we exploit the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism.

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(Konstanz), and the International Studies Association annual meetings for comments on an earlier draft. This research was initiated while Scheve was a visitor at the STICERD (LSE). In this paper we argue that religion and welfare state spending are substitute mechanisms that insure individuals against adverse life events. As a result, individuals who are religious will prefer lower levels of social insurance than will individuals who are secular. To the extent policy outcomes reflect individual preferences, then countries with higher levels of religiosity will have lower levels of welfare state spending. In formalizing our argument we also suggest that if benefits from religion are subject to a network externality (I derive greater pleasure from religion when others are also religious), it is possible for countries that are similar in terms of underlying conditions to exhibit multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium, high religiosity will coexist with low levels of social insurance, while in a second equilibrium there will be low religiosity and high social insurance. We empirically test our predictions using individual-level data on religiosity, individual level data on social insurance preferences, and cross-country data on social spending outcomes. The findings are strongly supportive of our hypotheses. 1

The authors used growth mixture models to study religious development during adulthood (ages 27–80) in a sample of individuals who were identified during childhood as intellectually gifted. The authors identified 3 discrete trajectories of religious development: (a) 40 % of participants belonged to a trajectory class characterized by increases in religiousness until midlife and declines in later adulthood; (b) 41 % of participants belonged to a trajectory class characterized by very low religiousness in early adulthood and age-related decline; and (c) 19 % of participants belonged to a trajectory class characterized by high religiousness in early adulthood and age-related increases. Gender, strength of religious upbringing, number of children, marrying, and agreeableness predicted membership in the trajectory classes. Results were largely consistent with the rational choice theory of religious involvement.

Where a community or group is socially excluded from a dominant group, some individuals of that group may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture. The aim of this paper is to investigate this issue by empirically analyzing the potential trade-off for ethnic minorities between sticking to their own roots and labour market success. We find that the social environment of individuals and attachments to culture of origin has a strong association with identity choice. Our results also suggest that those non-whites who have preferences that accord with being "oppositional " do experience an employment penalty.

Prepared for a special issue of Public Choice on the Political Economy of Terrorism, edited by Charles Rowley. Abstract: This paper challenges conventional views of violent religious extremism, particularly those that emphasize militant theology. We offer an alternative analysis that helps explain the persistent demand for religion, the different types of religious that naturally arise, and the special attributes of the “sectarian ” type. Sects are adept at producing club goods – both spiritual and material. Where governments and economies function poorly, sects often become major suppliers of social services, political action, and coercive force. Their success as providers is much more due to the advantages of their organizational structure than it is to their theology. Religious militancy is most effectively controlled through a combination of policies that raise the direct costs of violence, foster religious competition, improve social services, and encourage private enterprise.

: This paper is an introduction to model a market of religious commodities. The model here presented is focussed in the household choice about different religions and religions supply. Many religions are competing in the market, each offering a price for practising the religion. This model is formally based on spatial competition of Hotelling. Resulting from the equilibrium, the main result we get is: that extreme religions ("radicals") have an advantage against the moderate ones, because their worshippers have no other religious option. Hence, moderate religions will suffer detrimentally from the consequences of fundamentalism. J.E.L. Classification: P40, K39, D81. Keywords: Economics of Religion, religious consumer behaviour, Hotelling model, Competition. * The authors wish thank T. Weyman-Jones (Loughborough U.), M. Nuez-Nickel (U. de Jaen), J. Presley and A. Gourlay (Loughborough U.) all their comments and sugestions. In addition, we wishing to thanks Universidad CEU-S.Pablo Sem...

This paper presents an economic model of consumer behaviour within a religious framework. The individual is defined as religious, for whom God exists with absolute certainty. We distinguish between two separate targets facing the individual: human welfare and spiritual welfare. Joint maximisation of these two targets subject to time and budgetary constraints yields a solution in which the optimal values of consumption and religiosity are obtained. Allowance is also given to the compulsory payment of a religious tax. We show that the shape of the interchange curve between these two optimal values depends upon the relative shapes of the human welfare and spiritual welfare functions. Keywords: Religion; consumer behaviour; religious utility JEL Classification: D00, D11 *Corresponding author. Address: Pablo Braas Garza. rea de Fundamentos del Anlisis Economico. Departmento de Economa. Despacho 7262. Universidad de Jan. Paraje Las Lagunillas s/n. 23071 Jan, Spain. Tel.: Jan. Te...

A wealth of experimental literature studies the effect of repetition and group size on the extent of free riding in the provision of public goods. In this paper, we use data from honor systems for candy bars in 166 firms to test whether such effects can be found outside the laboratory. We find that free riding increases with repetition, and weak evidence that free riding decreases with group size. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.