The current study examines individuals who were raised in a certain religion and at some stage of their life left it. Currently, they define their religious affiliation as ‘no religion’. A battery of explanatory variables (countryspecific ones, personal attributes and marriage variables) was...

Economic theory, applied economic modeling and econometric methods offer advantageous tools for analyzing numerous organizations, institutions and social contexts which are not inherently downright economical by nature, as religious markets. In contemporary rational choice religious market...

This paper explores a highly controversial issue: while most European countries are undergoing a clear and well-documented process of secularization, the governments of these countries widely support religious institutions. The arguments put forward by the median voter seem insufficient to...

Preferences, including preferences for children, are shaped during the formative years of childhood. It is therefore essential to include exposure to religious practice during childhood in an attempt to establish a link between religiosity and fertility. This path has not been explored in the...

Data from the Austrian Family and Fertility Survey are used to examine for the first time the contemporary relationship between religion and fertility in first unions in Austria. Although Austria is a Catholic country, results from a Poisson hurdle model show that both women s denominational...

This paper explores the effect of religious observance and affiliation to the dominant religion (Catholicism) on trust in institutions, towards others and market attitudes. The analysis is performed using a Latin American database of twenty thousand respondents from 2004 by means of ordered...

This paper focusses on the insurance role of religion in buffering the well-being impact of stressful life events, and the ensuing economic and social implications. Using two large-scale European data sets, we show that the religious enjoy higher levels of life satisfaction, and that religion...

The paper examines intergenerational transmission of 'religious capital' from parents to their offspring, within an economic framework of a production function of 'religiosity' where parental inputs serve as factors of production. The database used for the empirical analysis is based on a...

This paper examines how two dimensions of childhood religion affiliation and participation are related to the probability of graduating from high school. Hypotheses derived from a human capital model are tested with data on non-Hispanic white and black women from the 1995 National Survey of...

This paper tests whether the behaviour of households in different countries is homogeneous with respect to the influence of religion on income. The violation of the homogeneity assumption would have two consequences. First, results based on country studies might not be applicable to other...