The Catholic sex abuse scandals reduced both membership and religiosity in the Catholic Church. Because government spending on welfare may substitute for the religious provision of social services, we consider whether this plausibly exogenous decline in religiosity affected several measures of...

The Catholic sex abuse scandals reduced both membership and religiosity in the Catholic Church. Because government spending on welfare may substitute for the religious provision of social services, we consider whether this plausibly exogenous decline in religiosity affected several measures of...

Catholic countries of Europe pose a demographic puzzle -fertility is unprecedentedly low (total fertility=1.3) despite low female labor force participation. We model three channels of religious effects on demand for children: through changing norms, reduced market wages, and reduced costs of...

The availability of public funding for charitable church activity has increased dramatically in the past decade. A key dispute over this increased availability is whether congregations' propensity to provide charitable services depends upon the racial composition of the community served. This...

Besides creating a growing, prosperous, and peaceful Europe, we all have an interest in ensuring that the benefits of this extend to the most unfortunate of those amongst us. The UN Millennium Development Goals provide a yardstick for how well this objective is being addressed. This paper...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper's motivating evidence we also uncover...

This paper examines how a religious festival (Ramadan) and the degree of religiosity affect cooperation and costly punishment in a public goods experiment. We find significantly higher cooperation levels outside the festival among less religious people. This behavior is consistent with a...

We investigate voluntary contribution to public goods in culturally heterogeneous groups with a laboratory experiment conducted among 432 Hindu and Muslim subjects in India. With our specification of 'Leading by example' we test for an interaction effect between leadership and religious...

Most interpretations of prevalent counterinsurgency theory imply that increasing government services will reduce rebel violence. Empirically, however, development programs and economic activity sometimes yield increased violence. Using new panel data on development spending in Iraq, we show that...