Despite some indications to the contrary, religion still plays an important role in contemporary society. In this paper, the association between religion and the quality of public goods and services, measured by the so-called “delivery quality” index of the Worldwide Governance Indicators...

This paper studies whether and how religious leaders affect politics. Focusing on Italian dioceses in the period from 1948 to 1992, we find that the identity of the bishop in office explains a significant amount of the variation in the vote share for the Christian Democracy party (DC). This...

This paper shows that peer pressure may lead to dynamic convergence to a norm that is skewed with respect to preferences in society, yet is endogenously upheld by the population. Moreover, a skewed norm will often be more sustainable than a representative norm. This may explain the skewness of...

Ethnic religious organizations are often blamed for slowing down immigrants' assimilation in host societies. This paper offers the first systematic evidence on this topic by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians had moved to America,...

There has been much study of the consequences of economic freedom but, outside of the role of political institutions, there has been little study of the determinants of economic freedom. We investigate whether religion affects economic freedom. Our cross-sectional dataset includes 137 countries...

Institutions, defined as "the rules of the game in society", drive economic growth and prosperity. Institutions often arise from long-term processes influenced by geography, major historical events, culture, and, less commonly, religion. This chapter reviews the available evidence to demonstrate...

This paper explores the role of religion in mitigating the degree to which unemployment reduces subjective well-being and it examines its support of social programs. The paper goes beyond existing literature in three ways: It extends existing literature to Latin America and Caribbean countries;...

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 examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities. If people perceive the consequences of the market economy as detrimental, they will be more...

Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...