We show that Eastern Orthodox believers are less happy compared to those of Catholic and Protestant faith using data covering more than 100 countries around the world. Consistent with the happiness results, we also find that relative to Catholics, Protestants and non-believers, those of Eastern...

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal health- care access as well as women's subjective well-being. Similar restrictions, also practised around the time of childbirth, are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during these phases of...

This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the presence of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are less effective for speakers of languages that contain future tense marking. Consistent with this...

We examine the gender legacy of past institutions by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the borders between the former Papal States on the one hand, and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Duchy of Modena on the other. Our results show that a century after the...

How does conflict exposure affect trust? We hypothesize that direct (firsthand) experience with conflict induces parochialism: trust towards out-groups worsens, but trust towards in-groups, owing to positive experiences of kin solidarity, may improve. Indirect exposure to conflict through...

This paper studies the effect of religion on the economic progress of Black Americans after Reconstruction. Southern religious institutions-particularly the Southern Baptist church-played a key role in the development of the Lost Cause mythology that helped legitimate the white supremacist...

This paper empirically tests Max Weber's thesis on how religious narratives, particularly the Protestant Ethic, influence attitudes toward wealth redistribution. Weber suggested that the Protestant Reformation, led to the belief that economic success was a sign of divine favor, legitimizing...

In "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Robert D. Woodberry (2012) claims that the emergence of stable democracies around the world was influenced by conversionary Protestantism. While Woodberry's historical analysis is exhaustive, the accompanying empirical evidence suffers from severe...

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary 1949-2017, for upper class and underclass families, using surnames to measure social status. In these years there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People's Republic, 1949-1989, a Communist regime with an...

This paper studies to what extent banning first-generation women from aborting affected the fertility of second-generation individuals who did not face such legal constraint. Using multiple censuses from Romania, I follow men and women born around the 1966 Romanian abortion ban to study the...