do religious norms influence corporate debt financing previous studies substantiate that religious social norms influence individual and organizational decisions using debt financing settings we examine whether a firm s religious environment influences outside parties perceptions in contracting with the firm we document that firms located in the more religious areas use less debt financing and receive better credit ratings bond investors require lower yields and impose fewer covenants on such firms using the 2002 revelation of sex abuse by catholic priests as an exogenous shock we verify that these findings are not driven by endogeneity issues our study highlights the role of social norms in financial transactions

growth and unemployment this paper analyses the effects of growth on long run unemployment using a search model of equilibrium unemployment where growth arises explicitly from the introduction of new technologies that require labour reallocation for their implementation the analysis uncovers and compares between two competing effects of growth on unemployment the first is a capitalisation effect whereby an increase in growth raises the capitalised returns from creating jobs and consequently reduces the equilibrium rate of unemployment the second is a creative destruction effect whereby an increase in growth reduces the duration of a job match thereby raising the equilibrium level of unemployment both directly by raising the job separation rate and indirectly by discouraging the creation of job vacancies this paper asks the question of how the rate of economic growth affects unemployment in the long run the main consideration that leads us to think that this is an interesting question has to do with the re allocative aspect of growth in the long run faster economic growth must come from a faster increase in knowledge to the extent that the advancement of knowledge is embodied in industrial innovations it is likely to raise the job destruction rate through automation skill obsolescence and the bankruptcy associated with the process of creative destruction in short increased growth is likely to produce an increased rate of job turnover and the search theories of lucas and prescott 1974 and pissarides 1990 imply that an increased rate of job turnover will result in a higher natural rate of unemployment this conclusion is also consistent with the empirical results of davis and haltiwanger 1990 which show that periods of high unemployment tend to be periods of high job turnover at the establishment level it suggests the possibility of a positive longrun tradeoff between growth and unemployment at least over some range there has been relatively little attention paid to our question in the literature on longrun determinants of unemployment for example the recent empirical examination by layard nickell and jackman 1991 of unemployment rates among oecd countries did not even consider the rate of economic growth as a possible explanatory variable this is consistent with the seminal theoretical work of phelps 1968 which implies that the natural rate of unemployment is independent of the rate of productivity growth the only

preserving religious identity through education economic analysis and evidence from the us abstract this paper models the decision of religious parents to send their children to private religious schools as reflecting their desire to shield their children from external influences and thus preserve their religious identity it follows that when the share of the minority in the local population grows and outside influences become less threatening the demand for separate religious schooling among the members of the religious group decreases this pattern implies concavity in the relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population we present empirical evidence from united states county data on catholic and private school enrollment that strongly supports our theory the paper contributes to a better understanding of the demand for religious education

disentangling the migration trade nexus the pro trade effects of immigrants and emigrants in the presence of vertical and horizontal product differentiation this paper presents an exploration of the migration trade nexus taking the case of italy by crossing the two dimensions of migration immigration and emigration and the two dimensions of intra ind

the growth potential of startups over the business cycle this paper shows that employment in cohorts of us firms is strongly influenced by aggregate conditions at the time of their entry employment fluctuations of startups are procyclical they persist into later years and cohort level employment variations are largely driven by differences in firm size rather than the number of firms an estimated general equilibrium firm dynamics model reveals that aggregate conditions at birth rather than post entry choices drive the majority of cohort level employment variation by affecting the share of startups with high growth potential in the aggregate changes in startup conditions result in large slow moving fluctuations in employment

the earnings and human capital of american jews this paper analyzes the earnings and returns from human capital investments of second generation american jews compared with non jews jewish men have 16 percent higher earnings other things the same a 20 percent higher rate of return from schooling and a steeper experience earnings profile these patterns persist even after controlling for occupation self employment status and geographic concentration in the new york area there are no systematic differences among jews by parents country of birth the findings suggest that american jews are more productive in creating and using human capital and that this has encouraged greater investments in human capital

labour market assimilation of foreign workers in italy this is the first paper to analyse the labour market assimilation of foreign i e non citizen workers in italy it considers the daily wages and the days of employment of male workers in whip a matched employer employee panel dataset from 1990 to 2003 the traditional human capital approach is augmented by a control for the probability of staying abroad modelled by aggregate variables of the origin country the human capital variables considered are age and experience both in and out of employment what emerges from the empirical analysis is discouraging foreigners who are able to get higher wages are the least likely to stay but assimilation profiles do not change when return migration is taken into account foreigners employed in the private sector earn the same wages as natives upon entry into employment but the two wage profiles diverge with on the job experience neither do foreigners assimilate from an employment perspective a differential in employment between foreign and native workers is found even upon entry which increases over time in the construction sector the wage and employment differential is even larger while manufacturing and services follow the aggregate trend africans immigrants have the fewest career prospects while eastern european and asian workers are less far behind the general pattern for foreign workers appears to be a fragmented career either restricted to seasonal or temporary jobs or alternating between legal and illegal employment

creative destruction and uncertainty uncertainty rises in recessions but does uncertainty cause downturns or vice versa this paper argues that counter cyclical uncertainty fluctuations are a by product of technology growth in a firm dynamics model with endogenous technology adoption faster technology growth widens the dispersion of firm level productivity shocks a benchmark uncertainty measure moreover faster technology growth spurs a creative destruction process generates a temporary downturn and renders uncertainty counter cyclical estimates from structural vector autoregressions vars on u s data confirm the model s predictions on average 1 4 of the cyclical variation in uncertainty is driven by technology shocks this fraction rises to 2 3 around the dot com bubble

religious pluralism and religious participation a game theoretic analysis1 does religious pluralism decrease religious participation or increase it secularization theorists claim the former while religious economies proponents claim the latter and each side has used estimated pluralism participation correlations to support its argument using a formal game theoretic model this article shows how religious market forces and regulations generate plausible pluralism participation correlations whether or not the direct causal mechanisms argued by either side of the debate exist the model generates testable hypotheses concerning the pluralism participation relationship at both local and national levels and yields insights into previous empirical work

sacrifice and stigma reducing free riding in cults communes and other collectives this paper presents an economic analysis of religious behavior that accounts for the continuing success of groups with strange requirements and seemingly inefficient prohibitions the analysis does not presuppose any special motives for religious activity rather religion is modeled as a club good that displays positive returns to participatory crowding the analysis demonstrates that efficient religions with perfectly rational members may benefit from stigma self sacrifice and bizarre behavioral restrictions the model also addresses sacrifice in nonreligious social clubs fraternities communes political parties work groups and families

religious participation and children s education a social capital approach abstract based on the argument in both economic and sociological literature that religion is conducive to children s human capital formation this paper provides a model of religious participation and explores a mechanism that social capital affects children s education a la coleman coleman j s 1988 social capital in the creation of human capital american journal of sociology 94 s95 s120 the model generates several interesting implications which help explain some important stylized facts about education and religion further in a dynamic setting the model shows that there exists a steady state in which individuals allocate a positive amount of time and resources to religious activities thus it complements the existing literature to explain why seemingly unproductive religions can be everlasting

mr smith and the preachers the economics of religion in the wealth of nations the extension of economic analysis to problems beyond the domain of formal markets and explicit prices represents a major recent intellectual development but economic imperialism is not new and was not invented in chicago adam smith in his wealth of nations extended economic reasoning to a variety of nonmarket exchange problems one example is his analysis of religious behavior smith viewed participation in religion as a rational device by which individual enhanced the value of their human capital he also explained the behavior of the clergy and other suppliers of religious services from an economic perspective

migration and trade theoretical and empirical research in economics suggests that bilateral migration triggers bilateral trade through a number of channels this paper assesses the functional form of the impact of migration on trade flows in a quasi experimental setting we provide evidence that the relationship is not log linear in particular at small levels of immigration stocks the elasticity of trade to migration is quite high and it declines to zero at about 4 000 immigrants if immigration stocks exceed such a level the evidence suggests that trade will not increase anymore this suggests that for cross country network and other effects flowing from immigration to materialise at a significant level for trade a high enough level of immigrant stocks is necessary but there appears to be satiation as immigrant numbers increase

community religion employees and the social license to operate the world bank recently noted social license to operate has traditionally referred to the conduct of firms with regard to the impact on local communities and the environment but the definition has expanded in recent years to include issues related to worker and human rights world bank 2013 http go worldbank org fz88vmom90 in this paper we examine a factor that can influence the kind of work conditions that can facilitate or obstruct a firm s attempts to achieve the social license to operate slo specifically we examine the empirical association between a company s employee practices and the religiosity of its local community by investigating their fixed and endogenous effects using a large and extensive u s sample we find a positive association between the employee friendly practices of a firm and the religiosity of the local community after controlling for several firm characteristics in addition after mitigating endogeneity with the dynamic panel system generalized method of moment and after employing several other econometric tests we still find a robust positive association between the religiosity of the local community and employee friendly practices since recent research has shown that the firm s treatment of its stakeholders is a key to achieving an slo and since employees constitute a highly significant stakeholder group we interpret our results as supporting the view that religion is an important influence on the kinds of employee practices that can increase the likelihood that a firm will acquire the slo

immigration and trade creation econometric evidence from canada immigrants may expand trade with their country of origin owing to superior knowledge of or preferential access to market opportunities the authors test this proposition using canadian trade data with 136 partners from 1980 to 1992 in an augmented gravity equation they find that a 10 percent increase in immigrants is associated with a 1 percent increase in canadian exports to the immigrant s home country and a 3 percent increase in imports they also find that among the primary categories of immigrants independents have the greater influence on trade immigration via the entrepreneur class appears to have less impact on trade than all other classes except refugees

the pro trade effect of the brain drain sorting out confounding factors we sort out confounding factors in the empirical link between bilateral migration and trade using newly available panel data on developing countries diaspora to rich oecd nations in a theory grounded gravity model we uncover a robust causal pro trade effect moreover we do not find evidence in favor of strong differences across education groups

technology shocks and job flows we consider a version of the solow growth model where technological progress can be investment specific or investment neutral the labour market is subject to search frictions and the existing productive units may fail to adopt the most recent technological advances technological progress can lead to the destruction of technologically obsolete jobs and cause unemployment we calibrate the model to replicate the high persistence that characterizes the dynamics of firms neutral technology and the frequency of firms capital adjustment we find that neutral technological advances increase job destruction and job reallocation and reduce aggregate employment investment specific technological advances reduce job destruction have mild effects on job creation and are expansionary hence neutral technological progress prompts schumpeterian creative destruction while investment specific technological progress operates essentially as in the standard neoclassical growth model using structural var models we provide support to the key dynamic implications of the model copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

horizontal and vertical intra industry trade in australian manufacturing does trade liberalization have any impact this paper contributes to the literature on intra industry trade iit by disentangling such trade into horizontally and vertically differentiated products and investigating their determinants in the context of trade liberalization in australia iit in australian manufacturing has increased following trade liberalization in 1980s and is increasingly dominated by vertically differentiated products industry level evidence confirms that the failure to segregate iit into horizontally and vertically differentiated products produces misleading results as their determinants differ also structural changes brought about by the policy liberalization appear to have an impact on total as well vertical iit

religious beliefs gambling attitudes and financial market outcomes this study investigates whether geographic variation in religion induced gambling norms affects aggregate market outcomes we conjecture that gambling propensity would be stronger in regions with higher concentrations of catholics relative to protestants consistent with our conjecture we show that in regions with higher catholic protestant ratios investors exhibit a stronger propensity to hold lottery type stocks broad based employee stock option plans are more popular the initial day return following an initial public offering is higher and the magnitude of the negative lottery stock premium is larger collectively these results indicate that religion induced gambling attitudes impact investors portfolio choices corporate decisions and stock returns

product complexity quality of institutions and the protrade effect of immigrants the paper assesses the trade creating impact of foreign born residents on the international imports and exports of the french regions where they are settled the protrade effect of immigrants is investigated along two intertwined dimensions the complexity of traded goods and the quality of institutions in partner countries the trade enhancing impact of immigrants is on average more salient when they come from a country with weak institutions however this positive impact is especially large on the imports of simple products when we turn to complex goods for which the information channel conveyed by immigrants is the most valuable immigration enhances imports regardless of the quality of institutions in the partner country regarding exports immigrants substitute for weak institutions on both simple and complex goods

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

religion liberty and economic development an empirical investigation the empirical investigations conducted for this paper show that one can not accept the null hypothesis that religion and liberty are not related to development judeo christianity in particular appears to an important determinant of economic development this is explained in part by its fostering of the private ownership of property nations with the judeo christian values are more likely to have political democracies that are conductive to economic development capitalist economies with judeo christian democracy are more likely to have higher levels of economic development

the importance of brand and competition in defining u s religious markets author affiliation brian goff department of economics 1906 college heights boulevard western kentucky university bowling green ky 42101 usa brian goff wku edu corresponding authormichelle w trawick dagger department of economics 1906 college heights boulevard western kentucky university bowling green ky 42101 usa michelle trawick wku edu acknowledgment the authors thank bob tollison colleagues participating in the economics workshop at wku and two anonymous reviewers for comments any remaining flaws are the authors responsibility 1 introductionover the past 40 years economists have vastly expanded their study of behavior in markets where there is no explicit trade of goods or services one of the most fundamental and ubiquitous of these markets is that of religious behavior where economists and other social scientists have explored a variety of influences on religious participation at the outset of this research program economic models of religious choice borrowed from long used choice theoretic concepts such as the law of demand or the cost of time more recent contributions have included household production models taking account of human capital or the role of market level forces particularly religious competition prior empirical research has resulted in the identification of a variety of determinants of religious participation these include income education race and the degree of monopolization or competitiveness in the religious market as the empirical application and testing of these models has proceeded researchers have been aware of problems in measuring various aspects of religious choice such as religious participation or religiosity at the most general level religiosity may imply a difference in a secular versus religious worldview at the level of actual observation it often measures how frequently one attends church while some of the basic measurement issues related to religious choice and behavior may be beyond the power of researchers to investigate one important aspect is not but has largely been overlooked that is the type or brand of religious choice by and large empirical research has skirted this important definitional issue and treated different types or brands of religious choice much like one would treat different brands of carbonated soft drinks using such a broad homogeneous definition of the religious product implicitly assumes that economic and demographic characteristics exert similar influences on different types or brands of religious participation and thereby assumes that such branding is not of empirical significance in defining religious markets and behavior within them 1 moreover some tension has existed in prior empirical work as to whether religious competition is an exogenous factor the common assumption or whether it helps to define the choice variable 2our central question is whether the same processes are driving religiosity across brands we ask do consumers of religion respond differently to key economic variables such as income religious competition or other factors based on the brand of religion being consumed likewise do some economic variables exert their influence independently of brand an important part of our investigation centers on how to measure brand we first rely on two indicators of brand broad denominational categories and intensity of participation in religious activity the denominational categories are mainline protestant evangelical protestant and catholic the intensity breakdown is based on geographic regions of low moderate and high religious participation in addition we also examine whether the degree of religious competition itself helps to define brand in the next section we develop theoretical explanations for variation in overall religious participation as well as by brand and discuss prior empirical work in this area

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

an empirical analysis of adoption i introduction adoption is as old as recorded history it was practiced by the ancient egyptians greeks and romans technically adoption is a legal procedure by which a couple or less commonly an individual takes someone else s child into their family and raises it as their own the child may be unrelated to either adoptive parent but is often the child of one member of the couple or related in some other way to the adoptive parents adoption severs all legal ties between the birth parents and the child and replaces them by a legal relationship between the child and the adoptive parents in most cases of adoption the birth parents voluntarily surrender their parental rights so that an adoption can take place it seems highly likely that the u s supreme court will allow further restrictions on the availability of abortion as a consequence considerable attention is certain to be focused on the adoption option and its social implications prior to 1970 fertility behavior was little studied by economists partly because it was thought that the determinants were largely noneconomic during the past two decades however economists using a choice theoretic framework have examined a variety of fertility issues such as marriage becker 1974 procreation and children detray 1973 birth control willis 1973 and abortion leibowitz eisen and chow 1986 surprisingly no economic research exists on the issue of adoption despite the fact that it represents a natural extension of the traditional theory of consumer choice most adoption research focuses on sociological issues such as infertility or adoption procedures this paper empirically estimates the supply of adoptions using the decision making economic framework of completed fertility developed by becker 1960 and extended by michael 1973 i believe their model s determinants of desired fertility and family size will also be significant in explaining a household s decision to give up a child for adoption section ii outlines the adoption model and relates it to the economic theory of desired fertility and family size the third and fourth sections discuss the empirical estimates of the adoption model the fifth section examines the impact of various state regulations on the adoption decision and the last section discusses public and social implications of the empirical results ii the adoption model michael argues that households decisions concerning desired family size and the timing of childbearing can be explained in terms of a household production function michael s model is based on a comparison of the benefits and costs from an additional child over time his theory of completed fertility purports to be over a household s full reproductive age span but it is in actuality a period by period analysis households are myopic in that although they consider the future costs and benefits of a child an independent decision is made in each period regarding whether to have a child a household s optimal family size may be for example two children but if when the first child is conceived the household perceives the timing of the birth as undesirable then at that point in time the net benefit from the additional child is negative the consequence is that the child is unwanted and the household will take steps to reduce the discrepancy between the desired and actual stock of children one possible solution is an adoption once a child is born a household has two choices keep the child or put it up for adoption michael s framework implies that the likelihood that a household will place a child for adoption is positively related to the negative discrepancy between the household s desired and actual stock of children at that time the factors affecting a household s desired family size income time values relative productivities and revealed tastes are reflected in the discrepancy between the desired and actual stock of children

risk rationality and religious portfolios i introduction this paper builds on two assumptions the first self evident the second more controversial together they yield a provocative theory of religious behavior and organization the first assumption is that religion involves a great deal of risk those who engage in religious acts cannot know that their efforts will have the desired effects religious acts thus have the character of risky investments exacting resource costs in return for uncertain rewards the second assumption is that people choose their religious behavior rationally weighing the costs and benefits of religious behavior and seeking to limit the risk associated with religious choices churches and other religious firms employ a variety of institutional arrangements that mitigate religious risk most arrangements follow one of two major risk management strategies which in turn give rise to two different styles of religion one centers on collective production the other on private production and diversified consumption collective religion is congregationally oriented and tends to employ exclusivity and costly prohibitions to limit free riding and maintain high levels of commitment private religion is less susceptible to free rider problems but also less capable of generating commitment private religion tends to center on client practitioner relationships or fee for service transactions and consumers tend not to form exclusive attachments to a single religious firm outright payments for goods and services overshadow costly demands for an austere deviant or sacrificial life style a large body of descriptive historic and anecdotal evidence confirms these predictions and illustrates their range of application the concluding sections of the paper apply the proposed theory to a series of contrasts asian versus western religion mainstream churches versus exclusive sects new age versus standard american religion and greco roman paganism versus judeo christian monotheism ii religious commodities and the problem of risk economic models of religious behavior typically begin by assuming that individuals allocate their time and money so as to maximize their utility from religious commodities r and all other secular commodities s the production of religious commodities depends on personal inputs of time and money but may also depend on past experience religious human capital styles of behavior such as diet dress and sexual practices and the time and money inputs of others such as fellow church members see azzi and ehrenberg 1975 sullivan 1985 and iannaccone 1992 for formal analyses and empirical tests with the exception of durkin and greeley 1991 and montgomery 1992 previous models take belief as given thereby sidestepping the issue of risk but religious commodities do involve risk sermons and scriptures do emphasize the need for faith and people do wrestle with and often yield to doubt insights from secular markets and the economics of uncertainty explain a broad range of behaviors and institutions that arise in response to religious risk in particular they highlight two different risk reducing strategies one of which centers on exclusivity and collective production the other centers on diversification and private production managing risk through collective action religious congregations the would be believer faces a situation not unlike the would be used car buyer used cars are classic experience goods nelson 1970 since potential buyers are hard pressed to determine car quality in advance of purchase sellers thus have an incentive to overstate the value of their merchandise and to disguise its true nature used car buyers in turn are aware of the sellers incentive to misrepresent their products and so will attempt to increase their stock of information and or reduce their risk in many ways they may demand guarantees seek information from third parties investigate the seller s reputation and so forth

does religion mitigate earnings management evidence from china using a sample of 11 357 firm year observations from the chinese stock market for the period of 2001 2011 we investigate whether and how religion can mitigate earnings management specifically based on geographic proximity based religion variables we provide strong and robust evidence to show that religion is significantly negatively associated with the extent of earnings management suggesting that religion can serve as a set of social norms to mitigate corporate unethical behavior such as earnings management our findings also reveal that the negative association between religion and earnings management is less pronounced for firms with closer distance to the regulatory centers than for their counterparts implying the substitutive effects between religion and the distance to regulators the proxy for regulatory intensity on mitigating earnings management the above results are robust to different measures of earnings management various religion variables and a variety of sensitivity tests

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

endogenous peer effects local aggregate or local average a b s t r a c t we develop a unified model embedding different behavioral mechanisms of social interac tions and design a statistical model selection test to differentiate between them in empirical applications this framework is applied to study peer effects in education effort in study ing and sport activities for adolescents in the united states we find that for education students tend to conform to the social norm of their friends while for sport activities both the social multiplier and the social norm effect matter

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

vertical and horizontal intra industry trade a cross industry analysis for the united kingdom a large theoretical literature has emerged directed at explaining the presence of intra industry trade iit one of the distinctions which comes out of these models is that between horizontal iit where goods are differentiated by attributes and vertical iit where goods are differentiated by quality in this paper horizontal and vertical iit in u k trade are disentangled using a unit value dispersion criterion and a range of industry characteristics the paper not only points up the relative importance of vertical and horizontal iit in the united kingdom it also demonstrates how a failure to separate them out can impact on the interpretation of empirical results copyright 1995 by royal economic society

immigrant links to the home country empirical implications for u s bilateral trade flows immigrants ties to their home countries can play a key role in fostering bilateral trade linkages immigrant ties include knowledge of home country markets language preferences and business contacts that have the potential to decrease trading transaction costs empirical results for the united states suggest that immigrant links have historically been important in increasing bilateral trade flows with immigrants home countries copyright 1994 by mit press

trade diaspora and migration to new zealand this paper examines the hypotheses that a greater stock of migrants in new zealand from a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand and a greater stock of new zealanders living overseas in a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand it also examines the relationships between migration diaspora and tourism exports the literature suggests that migrants can stimulate trade by lowering transaction costs and by bringing with them preferences for goods produced in their home country our approach is to apply panel data techniques within the framework of a standard gravity model of trade to a dataset consisting of information on 233 countries in each of the 26 years between 1981 and 2006 we estimate a random effects panel sample selection model using correlated random effects our results indicate that migration does indeed stimulate trade in our benchmark specification merchandise exports from and imports to new zealand both have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of migrants in new zealand imports also have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of new zealanders overseas our results also suggest that migration stimulates imports more than exports

does wealth imply secularization and longevity we develop a simple life cycle model with endogenous longevity where religious firms influence religious beliefs using donations as an input the model suggests that either wealth and economic development or competition by religiousfirms can explain cross countryvariationinreligiousbeliefs buttoexplaincross countryvariationinreligiousbeliefs longevity and consumption both development and competition are required our results depend on the wealth and substitution effects that accompany economic development and religious market competition

commercial policy and intra industry trade abstract this paper constructs a model of intra industry trade within a multi product industry whose output range is limited to that obtainable from a particular type of capital intra industry trade is a natural outcome in this structure without requiring increasing returns to scale or imperfectly competitive markets and with its pattern determined along traditional relative factor abundance lines the volume of this trade will vary inversely with the level of trade restrictions as observed empirically other policies are then considered for their influence on the range rather than the level of domestic production since the former is the more likely policy objective under these circumstances

volatility and welfare abstract this paper explores the relationship between volatility and welfare even though households prefer smooth streams of consumption and leisure welfare can be increasing in the volatility of an exogenous driving force if factor supply is sufficiently elastic we provide some analytical results for a model without capital and do some quantitative exercises in a model with capital and a variety of shocks welfare is greater in high shock volatility regimes under plausible parameter values augmenting the model with features that increase the elasticity of factor supply extends the range of parameters over which higher volatility results in greater welfare

dynamic models of religious conformity and conversion theory and calibrations abstract this paper develops overlapping generations models to explain and simulate changes in the proportion of secular and religious people the church is modeled as generating an externality associated with conformity enhancing education observed changes in the number of nonbelievers are explained by different birth rates among secular and religious parents and the relative proportion of young nonconformists calibrations for the conformity rates among secular and religious people show that the observed long run increase in the difference between percentage of secular people in europe and the united states can be attributed to lower conformity rates prevailing in europe

the trade creating effects of business and social networks evidence from france using theory grounded estimations of trade flow equations this paper investigates the role that business and social networks play in shaping trade between french regions the bilateral intensity of networks is quantified using the financial structure and location of french firms and bilateral stocks of migrants compared to a situation without networks migrants are shown to double bilateral trade flows while networks of firms multiply trade flows by as much as four in some specifications finally taking network effects into account divides the estimation of the impact of transport costs and of the effect of administrative borders by around three

does religion constrain the risky sex behaviour associated with hiv aids this article examines the likely effectiveness of public health interventions designed to change the risky sexual behaviour associated with human immunodeficiency virus acquired immune deficiency syndrome hiv aids by faith based organizations fbos we utilize data from the general social survey gss to estimate an economic model of sexual behaviour our theoretical approach proceeds by rationalizing on evolutionary grounds the existence of sexual activity in individual preference functions with unobservable costs imposed by religious beliefs and participation given the objective of utility maximization we justify the existence of demand functions for sexual activity that generate empirically testable hypotheses about the effects of religion and religious participation on risky sexual activity our results suggest that at least in the case of heterosexuals fbos can indeed influence the risky sexual behaviour that is associated with the transmission of hiv aids

trend breaks long run restrictions and contractionary technology improvements abstract structural vector autoregressions with long run restrictions are extraordinarily sensitive to low frequency correlations recent literature finds that the estimated effects of technology shocks are sensitive to how one treats hours per capita however after allowing for statistically and economically significant trend breaks in productivity results are much less sensitive hours fall when technology improves the issue is that the common high low high pattern of productivity growth and hours i e the low frequency correlation inevitably leads to a positive estimated response the trend breaks control for this correlation this example suggests a practical need for care in using long run restrictions

female labor supply and divorce new evidence from ireland if participation in the labor market helps to secure women s outside options in the case of divorce separation an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply this simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and or spatial variation in divorce legislation e g across us states leading to mixed results in this paper we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change i e the legalization of divorce in ireland the right to divorce was introduced in 1996 followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates we use this fundamental change in the irish society as a natural experiment we follow a difference in difference approach using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply mostly at the extensive margin results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting

isolating the network effect of immigrants on trade within the migration trade nexus literature this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade using cross sectional data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants the share of migrants employed in managerial business related occupations has a strong additional effect on trade those immigrants should be the ones directly involved in the diffusion and transmission of information relevant for companies trading with other countries their presence is found to increase the volume of trade especially of imports beyond the already known effect of immigrants or highly educated immigrants when we control for the presence of highly educated immigrants the share of immigrants in business network occupations shows a particularly large effect on trade in differentiated goods we also find that highly educated individuals in business related occupations are those contributing to stimulate import and export by the largest margin business network effects seem particularly important in stimulating exports to culturally different countries such as those with different language and legal origin

monopolistic competition and international trade reconsidering the evidence we test some propositions about international trade flows that are derived from models of monopolistic competition developed by elhanan helpman and paul krugman we investigate whether the volume of trade between oecd countries is consistent with the predictions of a model in which all trade is intraindustry trade in differentiated products we then repeat the test with non oecd countries we also investigate whether the share of intraindustry trade is consistent with a more general theoretical model in which some but not all trade is intraindustry trade our results lead us to question the apparent empirical success of these models

slow to hire quick to fire employment dynamics with asymmetric responses to news this paper studies models of rms that adjust asymmetrically to private signals and uses census data to assess predictions at the establishment level when rms hiring decisions respond more to bad signals than to good signals both aggregate volatility and the cross sectional dispersion of employment growth are countercyclical responses to measured technology shocks and the time series behavior of skewness are consistent with the mechanism even in the absence of physical adjustment costs and with homoskedastic shocks to fundamentals information processing under knightian uncertainty generates asymmetric adjustment

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

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

the ins and outs of unemployment an analysis conditional on technology shocks we analyze how unemployment job finding and job separation rates react to neutral and investment specific technology shocks neutral shocks increase unemployment and explain a substantial portion of it volatility investmentspecific shocks expand employment and hours worked and contribute to hours worked volatility movements in the job separation rates are responsible for the impact response of unemployment while job finding rates for movements along its adjustment path the evidence warns against using models with exogenous separation rates and challenges the conventional way of modelling technology shocks in search and sticky price models

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

religious participation and income the relationship between religion and income has been explored in several studies in this paper we extend this inquiry by arguing that religious participation through its effects on preferences and net earnings potential reduces participants incomes similarly we argue that high incomes discourage religious participation by encouraging individuals to substitute market work for religious activities in an empirical model we simultaneously estimate the effects of religious participation on income and income on religious participation using us state data on per capita personal income and church membership the results strongly support our hypotheses 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

shocks versus responsiveness what drives time varying dispersion the dispersion of many economic variables is countercyclical what drives this fact greater dispersion could arise from greater volatility of shocks or from agents responding more to shocks of con

economics religion and culture a brief introduction in this introduction we will avoid laboring over a definition of the economics of religion culture but this will not stop us from arguing that it is a burgeoning area of research work focusing on religious practice and related cultural issues dates back at least to adam smith but until the 1990s there had been little published by mainstream economists in this area recently however a variety of subfields in economics have taken up work here the jel classification code system includes a designation for papers on religion z12 and the american economic association via econlit keeps track of the number of journal articles published under this section of the code in fig 1 we show the number of papers published in this area in recent years as the picture shows there has been a sixfold increase in the total number of papers published in this area over the past decade including a number of truly excellent works some of the topics considered here include studies of how public policy affects attitudes and beliefs studies on the lasting economic implications of historic cultural institutions work on religious schooling versus secular schooling investigations of faith based social service provision work on violence and religious extremism analyses of religious donations and research on the connection between beliefs such as religious beliefs and behaviors

deregulating religion the economics of church and state traditional religious research fails to recognize religion as a market phenomenon it especially overlooks supply side factors that shape the incentives and opportunities of religious firms emphasizing instead demand side shifts in the perceptions tastes and needs of consumers this paper reviews the effects of government actions that alter religious supply a longer version appears in economic inquiry 40 2 april 1997

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

the effect of religiosity and religious festivals on positional concerns an experimental investigation of ramadan this article examines the effect of religion on positional concerns using survey experiments we focus on two of the dimensions of religion degree of religiosity and religious festivals by conducting the experiments during both the most important day of ramadan the night of power and a day outside ramadan we find that ramadan overall has a small and negative impact on positional concerns detailed analyses based on the sorting of individuals degree of religiosity reveal that the decrease in the degree of positional concerns during ramadan is mainly explained by a decrease in positionality among individuals with a low degree of religiosity

was weber wrong a human capital theory of protestant economic history max weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of protestant regions to a protestant work ethic we provide an alternative theory protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity we test the theory using county level data from late nineteenth century prussia exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the reformation to use distance to wittenberg as an instrument for protestantism we find that protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity but also to better education our results are consistent with protestants higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity

on the timing and efficiency of creative destruction we analyze the timing pace and efficiency of ongoing job reallocation that results from product and process innovation there are strong reasons why an efficient economy ought to concentrate both job creation and destruction during recessions when the opportunity cost of reallocation is lowest incomplete contracting between labor and capital can disrupt this synchronized pattern and decouple creation and destruction transactional difficulties also lead to technological sclerosis characterized by excessively slow renovation government incentives to production may alleviate high unemployment but exacerbate sclerosis in contrast creation incentives increase the pace of reallocation an optimal combination of both policies restores economic efficiency

simultaneous determination of church contributions and church attendance in a standard model of household allocation of time and income church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously there are life cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions as azzi and ehrenberg 1975 and ehrenberg 1977 have argued and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free rider problem as well this paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 protestant church members

preaching matters replication and extension statistical evidence in a recent excellent paper by lipford mccormick and tollison shows a negative relationship between church membership and social misbehavior this paper replicates that relationship using more comprehensive data by u s county we provide theoretical support for the statistical evidence by showing that churches encourage appropriate behavior thus providing property rights enforcement because doing so benefits churches and their members aa church membership increases property rights enforcement increases although at a diminishing rate

neither a borrower nor a lender be an economic analysis of interest restrictions and usury laws interest rate restrictions are pervasive and important regulations this article suggests that these restrictions served in part as a primitive means of social insurance lowering the rate of interest effectively transfers income to states of the world where individuals have a high marginal utility of income and are borrowers from states of the world where individuals have a low marginal utility of income and are lenders the model predicts that interest rate restrictions will be tighter when income inequality is high and impermanent and when growth rates are low furthermore loan supply must be somewhat inelastic data from u s states support a connection between inequality income shocks and tighter usury laws usury laws were also stricter in older more stable communities the history of usury laws suggests that this social insurance mechanism is one reason usury laws exist and persist but this history also suggests that usury laws have played many roles across time and that no one theory can po

the impact of charitable subsidies on religious giving and attendance evidence from panel data the literature documents that charitable giving is responsive to tax subsidies but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies this paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious participation using individual level panel data the results show that religious giving and participation are complements the implied cross price elasticity of religious participation with respect to the after tax price of giving is 0 27 furthermore a 1 increase in the amount of religious contributions is associated with a 0 4 increase in religious attendance these results are robust under several different specifications and highlight the positive externalities created by charitable subsidies

the dynamic effects of neutral and investment specific technology shocks the neoclassical growth model is used to identify the short run effects of neutral technology shocks which affect the production of all goods homogeneously and investment specific shocks which affect only investment goods the real equipment price crucial for identifying the investment shocks experiences an abrupt increase in its average rate of decline in 1982 so the analysis is based on a split sample on the basis of the preferred specification the two technology shocks account for 73 percent of hours and 44 percent of output s business cycle variation before 1982 and 38 percent and 80 percent afterward the shocks also account for more than 40 percent of hours and 58 percent of output s forecast errors over a three to eight year horizon in both samples the majority of these effects are driven by the investment shocks

order in the church a property rights approach this paper examines the organizational structure of christian churches and in doing treats churches as firms constrained by their theology like all firms churches must manage opportunistic behaviour the hypothesis of the paper is that the particular organizational structure of a given church is the result of transaction cost problems that arise in the production of its spiritual good an effort to test the theory is made by examining the history of the church and examining cases of church failures and successes

intra industry specialization in a multi country and multi industry framework the paper tests alternative hypotheses as to the factors determining the extent of intra industry trade defined as the share of this trade in total trade in a multi country and multi industry framework the empirical results show that the extent of intra industry trade in a particular industry between any two countries depends on the characteristics of the industry and the countries concerned the explanatory power of the regressions for the entire group of countries exporting manufactured goods as well as for trade among the developed countries is relatively high and practically all the hypotheses concerning the impact of industry trade are supported by the empirical results lower coefficients of determination have been obtained for trade between developed and developing countries and for trade among developing countries but the estimates generally support the hypotheses put forward in the paper in these cases also

revolt on the nile economic shocks religion and political power using centuries of nile flood data i document that during deviant nile floods egypt s highest ranking religious authority was less likely to be replaced and relative allocations to religious structures increased these findings are consistent with historical evidence that nile shocks increased this authority s political influence by raising the probability he could coordinate a revolt i find that the available data provide support for this interpretation and weigh against some of the most plausible alternatives for example i show that while nile shocks increased historical references to social unrest deviant floods did not increase a proxy for popular religiosity together the results suggest an increase in the political power of religious leaders during periods of economic downturn publication abstract

volatility and development why is gdp growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones we identify four possible reasons i poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors ii poor countries specialize in fewer sectors iii poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks e g from macroeconomic policy and iv poor countries macroeconomic fluctuations are more highly correlated with the shocks of the sectors they specialize in we show how to decompose volatility into these four sources quantify their contribution to aggregate volatility and study how they relate to the stage of development we document the following regularities first as countries develop their productive structure moves from more volatile to less volatile sectors second the level of specialization declines with development at early stages and slowly increases at later stages of development third the volatility of country specific macroeconomic shocks falls with development fourth the covariance between sector specific and country specific shocks does not vary systematically with the level of development we argue that many theories linking volatility and development are not consistent with these findings and suggest new directions for future theoretical work

designing global collective action in population and hiv aids programs 1983 2002 has anything changed the 1994 international conference of population and development icpd in cairo established goals for the expansion of assistance in matters of reproductive health and hiv aids this global effort marked a structural break in principle from the past but did it also change funding behavior panel data on expenditures of oecd donors for three types of aid agencies multilateral non governmental agencies and bilateral aid for the years 1983 2002 do not reveal an unambiguous improvement in donor behavior funding choices for multilateral organizations and ngos have become more interdependent but burden sharing remained stable and generosity dropped substantially after 1994

individual s religiosity enhances trust latin american evidence for the puzzle 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 probit models the most interesting results are i trust toward others is positively correlated with religious observance and with catholic affiliation ii there is a positive correlation between