This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

The Prologue to this issue discusses how the flatness of economics leaves out aspects of reality that do not fit neatly into its formulations. I agree that much is left out, but I am not so sure methodology is to blame. Rather, the omission is caused by our restriction of economic methodology to...

Around the year 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, based on archaeological research, the earliest civilizations in the Middle East were founded. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and the Israelites and other nations, later will appear on the map of history, being organized in small...

International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

Using cross-country data for about 70 countries and regional data for about 180 African provinces, we show that competition between Protestant and Catholic missionaries increased schooling in former colonies. Our evidence implies that Protestant missionaries increased schooling in Catholic...

An economic signalling model contributing to the explanation of religious schism is presented. Religious groups are interpreted as a device for exchanging information about and via others. Two effects result. First, the larger the network, the worse the signal quality one receives of the type of...

The present paper is a first attempt to measure and explain, from an economic perspective, the religious behavior of uruguayans (women in this stage), and compare the results with those obtained for some Latin American and developed countries. In this first stage, the efforts were concentrated...

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...