While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the Gallup World Poll for 109 countries and 43 U.S. states. Our empirical results indicate a robust,...