pre reformation roots of the protestant ethic we hypothesize that cultural appreciation of hard work and thrift the protestant ethic according to max weber had a pre reformation origin the proximate source of these values was according to the proposed theory the catholic order of cistercians in support we rst document an impact from the order on growth within the epicenter of the industrial revolution english counties that were more exposed to cistercian monasteries experienced faster productivity growth from the 13th century onwards consistent with a cultural in uence this impact is also found after the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s second we nd that the values emphasized by weber are relatively more pervasive in european regions where cistercian monasteries were located historically and that the legacy of the cistercians can be detected in present day employment rates across european sub regions

the political economy of churches in denmark 1300 2015 this paper reports new time series for the numbers and sizes of churches in denmark over a 715 year period per capita the new series are termed church densities a pattern emerges in the series that corresponds to the main development in the economy until 1750 the economy was in the traditional steady state where church densities were high and did not decline substantially modern development set in after 1750 since then church densities have declined more than five times moreover capacity utilization of church rooms has declined which means that the reduction in the demand for churches must have been even larger we argue that this large decline is caused by a fall in religiosity that is caused by economic development as measured by the rise in incomes in parallel with similar transitions in other sectors e g the agricultural transition it is termed the religious transition

political economy of agricultural policy in this article i focus on the findings from this study on the political economy of agricultural policy as they inform questions about the political economy of agricultural pricing primarily but not exclusively in developing countries to do so first i provide some background data on the comparative study i sketch the various stylized facts that were believed at the time and contrast them with the regularities that emerged from the comparative study finally i indicate some of the systematic empirical regularities and suggest the political economy conclusions which emerge from them

beliefs about the determinants of success and employment protection abstract we show that part of the international variation in employment laws is due to different beliefs about the impact of hard work as opposed to luck and connections on success in societies where a greater proportion of people relate their life prospects to chance and connections stronger employment protection is in place the prevalence of such beliefs is likely to hamper labor market reforms

magnitude and persistence of extreme risk spillovers in the global energy market a high dimensional left tail interdependence perspective abstract this paper studies the magnitude and persistence of extreme risk spillovers among stock returns of 124 energy companies worldwide between january 2006 and june 2019 as well as the corresponding firm specific determinants of firms extreme risk spillovers the high dimensional nonparametric method the coefficient of tail interdependence cti enables us to make better use of available information and to evaluate risk spillovers more precisely moreover we use spatial panel models that consider spatial heterogeneity among firms to explore the determinants of the risk spillovers the empirical findings from a study of energy firms risk spillover effects verify the necessity of persistence measurement also the most systemically risky energy companies are not necessarily the largest and some small firms can also generate large risk spillovers when they are in distress which indicates that determinants other than firm size could also affect the spillover effect such as business complexity and geographic location our regression results suggest that the extreme risk spillover of the energy companies exhibits significant heterogeneity in terms of business and region which deserves more attention for energy risk management the estimates can be used for making portfolio decisions and designing regulatory policies

the effect of education on religion evidence from compulsory schooling laws abstract for over a century social scientists have debated how educational attainment impacts religious belief in this paper i use canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity i find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious affiliation later in life an additional year of education leads to a 4 percentage point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition this is a reasonably large effect extrapolating the results to the broader population would suggest that increases in schooling could explain most of the large rise in non affiliation in canada in recent decades

the transition of corruption from poverty to honesty measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries we use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels we find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross country pattern of corruption just as well as do actual incomes this result demonstrates that the long run causality is entirely from income to corruption hence there is a corruption transition as countries get rich corruption vanishes

a broadened causality in variance approach to assess the risk dynamics between crude oil prices and the jordanian stock market within the new developed causality in variance approach this paper builds up a broad methodological framework to more accurately capture the risk spillover effects between global oil prices and jordanian stock market returns during the period 1 march 2003 31 january 2014 the sample period is divided on the basis of the 2008 financial crisis into pre crisis and post crisis periods results for the pre crisis period show a lack of risk spillovers between global oil and the jordanian stock market after the crisis however we find evidence for one way risk spillover running from the oil market these findings have implications for the design of appropriate asset allocation and regulatory policies to manage risk spillover effects

religion and work micro evidence from contemporary germany abstract using micro data from contemporary germany this paper studies the connection between protestantism and modern day labor market outcomes to address the endogeneity in self declared religion i exploit a provision in a sixteenth century peace treaty which determined the geographic distribution of catholics and protestants reduced form and instrumental variable estimates provide no evidence of an effect of protestantism on hourly wages however relative to their catholic counterparts protestants do appear to work longer hours the patterns in the data are difficult to reconcile with explanations based on institutional factors or religious differences in human capital acquisition religious differences in individuals values however can account for most of the estimated effects

a lagrange multiplier test for causality in variance we adapt the lagrange multiplier lm principle to test for noncausality in variance of financial returns the new test is compared with a portmanteau statistic cheung y w ng l k 1996 a causality in variance test and its application to financial market prices journal of econometrics 72 33 48 a monte carlo study reveals superior power of the lm test

economic and security consequences of supreme values islamic societies have in contemporary times lagged western societies in income growth and human development indicators the supreme values of radical islam further de prioritize economic achievement and impose self deprivation on own populations this paper investigates the reasons for economic outcomes under islam contemporary illustrations are also provided of the self deprivation predicted from pursuit of the supreme value objectives of radical islam the self deprivation is placed in a rent seeking context

increasing financial inclusion in the muslim world evidence from an islamic finance marketing experiment low utilization of household credit in developing countries may be partially due to religious considerations in a randomized marketing experiment in jordan this paper estimates the effect of sharia compliant loan features on demand for credit to comply with islamic law the sharia compliant product uses a bank fee rather than an interest payment structure while keeping the rest of the product features very similar sharia compliance increased the application rate for loans from 18 percent to 22 percent an increase in demand that is equivalent to a 10 percent decrease in interest rates this study also randomly varied the price of the sharia compliant loan and finds that less religious individuals are twice as elastic with respect to price as the more religious by comparing reasons for refusal across treatment groups this paper estimates that survey measures that try to assess the importance of religious objections to conventional credit overestimate the importance of this type of objection by a third

religion religiosity and educational attainment evidence from the compulsory education system in england this paper investigates the effect of religion on the educational attainment of pupils in their final year of compulsory education in england the results show that pupils that identify with any re

relationships between oil price shocks and stock market an empirical analysis from china this paper investigates the interactive relationships between oil price shocks and chinese stock market using multivariate vector auto regression oil price shocks do not show statistically significant impact on the real stock returns of most chinese stock market indices except for manufacturing index and some oil companies some important oil price shocks depress oil company stock prices increase in oil volatility may increase the speculations in mining index and petrochemicals index which raise their stock returns both the world oil price shocks and china oil price shocks can explain much more than interest rates for manufacturing index

values and marginal preferences in international business in a recent paper in this journal maseland and van hoorn argued that values surveys tend to conflate values and marginal preferences this assertion has been challenged by brewer and venaik who claim that the wording of most survey items does not suggest that these elicit marginal preferences this commentary responds to their claim and restates our original argument we stress that the distinction between values and marginal preferences is a conceptual rather than a semantic issue conflation of the two is a problem of stated preferences methods in general regardless of question formats what is more we argue that support for the marginal preferences interpretation of values survey data does not come from the specific wording of questions used in surveys but from a growing number of paradoxical relations between values ratings and outcomes in values research implications are twofold first we argue that in order to measure values we need to look at alternatives to the stated preferences approach such as revealed preferences and experienced preferences of which the latter seems most promising second we find that values surveys eliciting marginal preferences are useful for understanding and predicting differences in behavior in a given context

crude oil prices and sectoral stock returns in jordan around the arab uprisings of 2010 abstract in this paper we test for mean and variance causality between world oil prices and sectoral equity returns in jordan before and after the arab uprisings that started in 2010 the testing methodology is based on the sample of cross correlation functions that are computed from the standardized residuals of a garch process our results show that the influence is not uniform across the equity sectors the oil return shocks significantly impact the financials and the services sectors while its effect is insignificant on the industrials sector this result is more pronounced in the period that follows the arab uprisings in terms of risk transfer we find that oil is a negligible risk factor however there is still a significant evidence of risk transmission to the industrials sector particularly during the arab uprisings period these results represent a unique information transmission mechanism that is useful for risk management and portfolio diversification

oil prices exchange rates and emerging stock markets abstract while two different streams of literature exist investigating 1 the relationship between oil prices and emerging market stock prices and 2 the relationship between oil prices and exchange rates relatively little is known about the dynamic relationship between oil prices exchange rates and emerging market stock prices this paper proposes and estimates a structural vector autoregression model to investigate the dynamic relationship between these variables impulse responses are calculated in two ways standard and the recently developed projection based methods the model supports stylized facts in particular positive shocks to oil prices tend to depress emerging market stock prices and us dollar exchange rates in the short run the model also captures stylized facts regarding movements in oil prices a positive oil production shock lowers oil prices while a positive shock to real economic activity increases oil prices there is also evidence that increases in emerging market stock prices increase oil prices

the religious transition a long run perspective we use factor analysis to derive a robust measure of religiosity from items reported in five waves of the world value survey our measure of religiosity is negatively correlated with per capita income development apparently causes religiosity to fall to about half its pre modern level most components of the demand for religion are reduced by development the supply of religion declines once churches lose control over the institutions providing collective goods like education health and social security these goods used to be supplied by churches jointly with religious services but tend to be supplied by the state with rising levels of development aspects of supply and demand are integrated in a ces production function framework that can explain the direction of causality in the observed negative correlation between income and religiosity

the intergenerational transmission of risk and trust attitudes recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models this paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature 1 transmission of attitudes from parents to children 2 an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment on child attitudes and 3 positive assortative mating of parents which enhances the ability of a parent to pass on his or her attitudes to the child we focus on two fundamentally important attitudes willingness to take risks and willingness to trust others we find empirical support for all three aspects providing an empirical underpinning for the literature an investigation of underlying mechanisms shows that socialization is important in the transmission process various parental characteristics and aspects of family structure are found to strengthen the socialization process with implications for modeling the socialization production function and for policies focused on affecting children s non cognitive skills the paper also provides evidence that the transmission of risk and trust attitudes affects a wide variety of child outcomes implying a potentially large total effect on children s economic situation

the size of human capital externalities cross country evidence human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities however the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive the missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients or by an inappropriate level of aggregation our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model we ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view paldam 2002 is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality

religion and economy religion has a two way interaction with political economy with religion viewed as a dependent variable a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs with religion viewed as an independent variable a key issue is how religiosity affects individual characteristics such as work ethic honesty and thrift and thereby influences economic performance in this paper we sketch previous studies of this two way interaction but focus on our ongoing quantitative research with international data

joint ventures and offshore oil lease sales alternative explanations of joint bidding for offshore oil tract leases are examined the models suggest that firms undertake joint bids 1 to reduce risk by spreading ownership across tracts 2 to share technical expertise including information and 3 to ameliorate financial constraints these hypotheses are examined empirically using the multiple logit technique and other tests with data constructed from the baltimore canyon sale of 1976 the results suggest that firms behaviors are consistent with the explanations of diversification and sharing of expertise explanations based on financial constraints are shown to be consistent with the data in the risk averse case but not in the risk neutral case implications of these results for research and policy are discussed

identifying the causal effect of income on religiosity using the earned income tax credit abstract how do economic conditions income and the generosity of social insurance affect religious behavior this paper provides novel evidence for the united states using variation in earned income tax credit benefits across states over time and by number of children in the raw data income and religiosity have a trivial relationship in contrast the instrumental variables strategy shows that increases in income from the eitc are found to sizably reduce religious attendance among low income individuals among individuals who attend the results indicate that an additional 1000 in annual income is associated with a decrease of roughly 1 service per year as compared to an average of 16 services per year the effect arises mainly along the intensive margin decreasing devout behavior and increasing more marginal attendance but having little impact on whether an individual participates at all or on beliefs there are also minimal effects on the occurrence and amount of contributions to religious organizations the results extend our understanding of the determinants of religiosity the relationship between governmental income support and religious behavior and the social effects of the earned income tax credit

religiosity and income a panel cointegration and causality analysis abstractin this article we examine the long run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1930 to 1990 we employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality we show that there exists a negative long run relationship between the level of religiosity measured by church attendance and the level of income measured by the log of gdp per capita the result is robust to alternative estimation methods potential outliers different samples different measures of church attendance and alternative specifications of the income variable long run causality runs in both directions higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income

measuring financial asset return and volatility spillovers with application to global equity markets we provide a simple and intuitive measure of interdependence of asset returns and or volatilities in particular we formulate and examine precise and separate measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers our framework facilitates study of both non crisis and crisis episodes including trends and bursts in spillovers and both turn out to be empirically important in particular in an analysis of sixteen global equity markets from the early 1990s to the present we find striking evidence of divergent behavior in the dynamics of return spillovers vs volatility spillovers return spillovers display a gently increasing trend but no bursts whereas volatility spillovers display no trend but clear bursts

dynamic spillovers between oil and stock markets in the gulf cooperation council countries this article exploits a new spillover directional measure proposed by diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 to investigate the dynamic spillover of return and volatility between oil and equities in the gulf cooperation council countries during the period 2004 to 2012 our results indicate that return and volatility transmissions are bi directional albeit asymmetric in particular the oil market gives other markets more than it receives in terms of both returns and volatilities these trends were more pronounced in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008 as the net contribution of oil has intensified after a burst during the crisis the empirical evidence from the sample is consistent with a system in which oil is playing the dominant role in the information transmission mechanism between oil and equities in the gcc countries

crude oil and stock markets stability instability and bubbles abstract we analyze the long run relationship between the world price of crude oil and international stock markets over 1971 1 2008 3 using a cointegrated vector error correction model with additional regressors allowing for endogenously identified breaks in the cointegrating and error correction matrices we find evidence for breaks after 1980 5 1988 1 and 1999 9 there is a clear long run relationship between these series for six oecd countries for 1971 1 1980 5 and 1988 2 1999 9 suggesting that stock market indices respond negatively to increases in the oil price in the long run during 1980 6 1988 1 we find relationships that are not statistically significantly different from either zero or from the relationships of the previous period the expected negative long run relationship appears to disintegrate after 1999 9 this finding supports a conjecture of change in the relationship between real oil price and real stock prices in the last decade compared to earlier years which may suggest the presence of several stock market bubbles and or oil price bubbles since the turn of the century

the bicausal relation between religion and income in this article the relation between religion and income is investigated using a micro dataset for the netherlands religion is measured by religious membership and by participation instead of estimating a religion equation and an income equation separately joint regression is preferred since this generally yields more efficient estimates following the single equation approach both religious measures are found to decrease income significantly and income is found to affect religion negatively however these cross effects become insignificant once the equations are estimated simultaneously in contrast the effects of socio economic characteristics on religion and income hardly differ between the approaches

why did the netherlands develop so early the legacy of the brethren of the common life this research establishes a link between the brethren of the common life bcl a religious community founded by geert groote in deventer in the late fourteenth century and the early economic development of the netherlands the bcl stimulated human capital accumulation the historical analyses show that the bcl contributed to the high rates of literacy to the high level of book production and to city growth in the netherlands these findings are supported by a set of ols regressions and further corroborated by 2sls estimates that use distance from deventer as an instrument for the presence of the bcl

secularization and long run economic growth in a consumer culture the consumer not christ is king skye jethani i introduction this paper proposes a novel theory of identity choice and endogenous economic growth in which secularization is both cause and consequence of successful economic development it contributes to the literature on the fundamentals of economic growth acemoglu 2009 by proposing a theory of how culture driven by economic change may change rapidly and where cultural change in turn drives further economic development the core idea is that through abandoning their religious identity their strife for salvation from the dire situation on earth individuals are able to derive more pleasure from material possessions and consumption activities the prospect of pleasure in this world motivates them to work harder and save more for future consumption increasing labor supply and capital accumulation induces technological progress and income growth which entices further individuals to abandon religion in order to derive more pleasure from material possessions which motivates them to supply more labor and capital etc through this feedback loop the economy takes off when religiosity declines and industrialization is observed in conjunction with secularization following the literature i define religious as believing in a god or a group of gods and following the rules of a religion mckendrick brewer and plumb 1982 although the proposed theory is perhaps more general the paper focuses on economic and religious developments of the western world which means it focuses on christian beliefs i define as the core creed of christian religion that through belief in and acceptance of the death and resurrection of jesus christ sinful humans can be reconciled with god and thereby are offered salvation and the promise of eternal life metzger and coogan 1993 the christian church is the agent specialized in promoting the desire for these immaterial heavenly values and goals ekelund et al 1997 i define as religious identity the self identification with christian religious values in section ii i argue that individuals identify with either immaterial self transcendence values religion or with material self enhancement values materialism i argue that individuals using individual possessions or consumption activities as identity fixers have chosen a secular materialistic identity i define as secularization the decline in the social significance of religion manifested by the decline in the number of religious people individuals identifying with religion measured by declining church attendance bruce 2011 most scholars of religion agree that for christians church attendance is a good measure of religiosity brierley 1999 bruce 2011 warner 2010 attending the sunday service was obligatory for protestants of most denominations as well as for members of the anglican church and deliberate failure to attend sunday mass is still considered to be a grave sin according to catholic canon law in the economists language church attendance is a revealed preference because church is the only place where sins can be forgiven not attending shows a loss of interest in salvation and eternal life the main goods offered by the church attendance is strongly but not perfectly correlated with adherence in particular attendance declines before membership declines bruce 2011 moreover there exists a temporary phase of fuzzy fidelity in which many individuals claim that while religion is not important in their life they continue to consider themselves christians and occasionally appear in church voas 2008 this temporary state is not explicitly taken into account in the theory below but considered to be best described by a secular identity as industrialization secularization is a general phenomenon observed throughout the western world the first data point however is only observed in 1851 for england when church attendance was about 60 brierley 1999

introduction to the economics of religion after a very long hiatus economists have begun again to study the relationship between economics and religion this article seeks to summarize and evaluate the principal themes and empirical findings that have appeared in some 200 recent papers on the economics of religion although some of the research concerns the economic consequences of religiosity most applies standard economic theory to the study of individual religious activity the characteristics of religious groups and the impact of regulation and competition on religious markets

which countries have state religions among 188 countries 72 had no state religion in 2000 1970 and 1900 58 had a state religion throughout and 58 had 1 or 2 transitions we use a hotelling spatial competition model to analyze the likelihood that the religion market would be monopolized similar forces influence a government s decision to establish a state religion consistent with the model the probability of state religion in 1970 and 2000 is increasing with the adherence rate to the main religion has a nonlinear relation with population and has little relation with per capita gdp the probability of state religion decreases sharply under communism but lagged communism has only a weak effect with costly adjustment for institutions the probability of state religion in 1970 or 2000 depends substantially on the status in 1900 this persistence is much stronger for countries with no major regime change than for countries with such a change

meteor showers or heat waves heteroskedastic intra daily volatility in the foreign exchange market this paper seeks to explain the causes of volatility clustering in exchange rates careful examination of intra daily exchange rates provides a test of two hypotheses heat waves and meteor showers the heat wave hypothesis is that the volatility has only country specific autocorrelation alternatively the meteor shower is a phenomenon of intra daily volatility spillovers from one market to the next using the garch model to specify the heteroskedasticity across intra daily market segments we find that the empirical evidence is generally against the null hypothesis of the heat wave using a volatility type of vector autoregression we examine the impact of news in one market on the time path of per hour volatility in other markets

do women supply more public goods than men preliminary experimental evidence from matrilineal and patriarchal societies francine d blau cornell university janet m currie columbia university charles a holt university of virginia steffen andersen porcelaeenshaven 16 a 1 dk 2000 frederiksberg tel 45 3815 2591 fax 45 3815 2576 e mail sa eco cbs dk erwin bulte warandelaan 2 5037 ab tilburg the netherlands tel 31 13 466 2707 erwin bulte wur nl uri gneezy otterson hall room 4s136 9500 gilman dr 0553 la jolla ca 92093 0553 phone 858 534 4312 fax 858 534 0745 ugneezy ucsd edu john a list corresponding author 1126 east 59

uncertainty experience and the winner s curse in ocs lease bidding this paper presents an empirical test of the major hypothesis of the currently accepted bidding models in two regions of differing tract value uncertainty the most significant result is an empirical verification that the more bidders that bid on a particular parcel in the face of great uncertainty the lower the bid levels of individual firms that participate given all else is constant no such relationship was observed however in the sale where there was previous bidding experience and prior ownership of closely related tracks prior models have not been able to identify the inverse relationship because of a bias that occurs when only positive bids are employed in these models and the use of data where previous experience reduces uncertainty in the analysis of the competitive bidding situation we use a two stage procedure which adjusts for this selection bias by allowing for the incorporation of information from the dichotomous bid no bid decision in the modeling of bid level

from farmers to merchants conversions and diaspora human capital and jewish history from the end of the second century ce judaism enforced a religious norm requiring fathers to educate their sons we present evidence supporting our thesis that this change had a major influence on jewish economic and demographic history first the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies 2nd to 7th centuries prompted voluntary conversions of jews that account for a share of the reduction from 4 5 to 1 2 million second the jewish farmers who invested in education gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the urbanization in the abbasid empire in the near east 8th and 9th centuries and they did select themselves into these occupations third as merchants the jews invested even more in education a precondition for the mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world fourth the jews generated a voluntary diaspora within the muslim empire and later to western europe fifth the majority of world jewry lived in the near east when the mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm and hence converted as it had happened centuries earlier jel j1 j2 n3 o1 z12 z13

equilibrium patterns of competition in ocs lease sales an equilibrium model of bidding behavior is developed that accounts for observed fluctuations in the degree of competition to acquire offshore petroleum leases as one might expect such fluctuations are related to the heterogeneity of geological prospects that are offered for sale with a relatively high degree of competition to acquire tracts of the highest quality the equilibrium configuration of bids is also shown to reflect structural characteristics such as capital market constraints that may restrict competition in the lease auction empirical evidence is presented which tends to confirm our general theory of bidding equilibria but which contradicts the popular notion that capital constraints have restricted competition in ocs lease sales policy implications are discussed in the concluding section

religion and earnings is it good to be an atheist with religious parental background abstract using german employee data we find that being raised by two religious parents and having no current religious affiliation is associated with higher earnings this conforms to the hypothesis that people who are raised religiously and reject religion as adults are economically more successful as they combine a strong internalized work ethic with an increased interest in present consumption as opposed to afterlife consumption

the spirits of capitalism and socialism the world values survey contains an item on ownership which is polled 200 times in 92 countries at the four waves of 1990 1995 2000 and 2005 these polls are developed into the cs score that measures the aggregate mass support for capitalism and socialism four hypotheses are advanced and tested to explain the wide variation in the 200 cs scores it is due to the cross country distribution of income and consequently the west stands out as the most capitalist minded area of the world institutions of the country such as legal quality the left right dimension in politics and cultural differences