making the same mistake again or is this time different the world faces an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions but much of the policy response has certainly not lacked for precedent national governments and international organisations including the international monetary fund imf have looked to crises of the past for solutions to the present and austerity has become a familiar theme the inability to effectively resolve the current crisis however gives rise to the question is this time different this article provides a broad overview to the origins and development of the recent economic crisis and the resort to policies of austerity although there is historical precedent for the resort to austerity such as the uk treasury view during the 1920s and 1930s this time things are different many of the current problems are deeply rooted and reflect the impact of the shift towards free market economics that started in the 1970s 2 the origins of the crisis since the beginning of the 1970s the private sector finance in particular has reorganised on an increasingly global scale it has innovated in terms of both structure and products and it has experienced significant growth as tridico 2012 this issue shows this financialisation was characterised by a ballooning of stock exchanges as many firms decided not only to list their shares but also to become involved in speculative finance in response to pressures on firms to maximise shareholder value together with the progressive erosion of worker and trade union rights and influence labour markets became more flexible and real wages stagnated concurrently profits rebounded leading to burgeoning inequality in this context aggregate demand and consumption were bolstered by easy credit and the wealth effects of speculative bubbles first in stocks and shares and then in housing

the role of the media in fiscal consolidation programmes the case of ireland a number of european countries have implemented austerity programmes since the onset of the current economic crisis this paper focuses on fiscal consolidation a central aspect of such programmes using the case of ireland it investigates the significant role of the mass media in presenting such policies to the public a role which has so far remained unexamined conceiving of the irish experience over the past few decades as a case of neoliberalisation it uses a critical political economic conceptualisation of news organisations to consider 431 editorials and opinion articles discussing fiscal consolidation in three leading irish newspapers between 2008 and 2012 it finds that the majority of articles present viewpoints in favour of fiscal consolidation and display a preference for spending cuts over tax hikes which substantiates the claim that ireland has adopted neoliberal policies to address the crisis only a minority of articles oppose fiscal consolidation these mostly contest specific spending cuts but usually fail to criticise fiscal consolidation itself by calling for economic alternatives such as keynesian stimulus differences between newspapers are also discussed highlighting their ideological cleavages

is the secularization hypothesis valid a panel data assessment for taiwan the secularization thesis is based on the idea that a country becomes more secular as it becomes richer and more industrialized in order to investigate whether this hypothesis is valid we examine the relationship between religion in taiwan and economic development across 23 counties by adopting the panel data approach for the period 1998 to 2003 we select six religious activity proxy variables and five economic development variables in a cross county panel data framework the evidence indicates that the ratio of females to males has a significantly positive effect and that the literacy rate and population density each have a significantly negative effect on the religious variables finally except for the christian culture the unemployment rate has a positive effect on the religious variables our findings thus support the view that the religious secularization hypothesis is valid in taiwan

are church and state substitutes evidence from the 1996 welfare reform abstract churches provide community services similar to those provided by the government but there has been no convincing analysis of the extent to which church activity can substitute for government activity to address this important issue this paper uses a new panel data set of presbyterian church usa congregations to regress both church member donations and a church s community spending on a number of variables including government welfare expenditures a provision of the 1996 welfare law that decreased the availability and use of welfare services by non citizens serves as an instrument to identify the causal effect of government spending on church activity the results show that church activities substitute for government activities extrapolating the findings to all denominations the estimated crowd out effect lies between 20 and 38 cents on the dollar the results are subjected to a number of robustness tests

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

an analytical approximation of target zone exchange rate functions the technique of collocation abstract this paper applies the analytical approximation technique of collocation to the stochastic sticky price exchange rate target zone model the technique can be used to trace out the resulting nonlinear exchange rate path with remarkable accuracy while requiring comparatively little computational effort

target zones and exchange rate dynamics this paper develops a simple model of exchange rate behavior under a target zone regime it shows that the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even when the exchange rate lies inside the zone and is thus not being defended actively somewhat surprisingly the analysis of target zones turns out to have a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty

the law and economics movement in the last thirty years the scope of economics has expanded dramatically beyond its traditional domain of explicit market transactions today there is an economic theory of property rights of corporate and other organizations of government and politics of education of the family of crime and punishment of anthropology of history of information of racial and sexual discrimination of privacy even of the behavior of animals and overlapping all these but the last of law 2 some economists oppose this expansion in whole or more commonly in part 3 there are a number of bad reasons all i think closely related for such opposition and one slightly better one 1 one bad reason is the idea that economics means the study of markets so that nonmarket behavior is simply outside its scope this type of argument owes nothing really to economics but instead reflects a common misconception about language more specifically a failure to distinguish among three different types of word or concept the first type illustrated by the term marginal cost is purely conceptual the term is rigorously and unambiguously defined by reference to other concepts just as numbers are but again like numbers there is no observable object in the real world that it names try finding a firm s marginal costs on its books of account the second type of word illustrated by rabbit refers to a set of real world objects few such words are purely referential one can speak of a pink rabbit or a rabbit the size of a man without misusing the word even though one is no longer using it to describe anything that exists nevertheless the referential function dominates finally there are words like law religion literature and economics which are neither conceptual nor referential such words resist all efforts at definition they have in fact no fixed meaning and their dictionary definitions are circular they can be used but not defined 4 one cannot say that economics is what economists do because many noneconomists do economics one cannot call economics the science of rational choice either the word rational lacks a clear definition and passing that difficulty there can be noneconomic theories of rational choice in which few predictions of ordinary economics may hold for example because the theory assumes that people s preferences are unstable there can also be nonrational economic theories an example is the type of survival theory in industrial organization in which firms that randomly hit on methods of lowering their costs expand vis a vis their rivals another example is marxism one cannot call economics the study of markets either not only because that characterization resolves the question of the domain of eco judge u s court of appeals for the seventh circuit senior lecturer university of chicago law school 1111 e 60th st chicago il 60637 i thank gary becker frank easterbrook william landes geoffrey miller richard porter george stigler geoffrey stone and alan sykes for comments on a previous draft and nir yarden for research assistance see for example gary becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1985 p 53 george stigler 1984 gerard radnitzky and peter bernholz 1986 2 for a recent conspectus of economic analysis of law see my book 1986 3see for example ronald coase 1978 coase is of course a leading figure in the economics of property rights so his opposition is far from total 4for an excellent discussion see john ellis 1974 ch 2

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

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

output effects of government purchases the theoretical analysis focuses on the distinction between temporary and permanent movements in government purchases under plausible conditions the temporary case involves an output response that is positive less than one to one with the change in government purchases and larger than that generated by an equal sized but permanent shift in purchase the equilibrium real rate of return rise in the temporary case but changes little in the permanent one defense purchases are divided empirically into permanent and temporary components by considering the role of temporary wars no temporary shifts in nondefense purchases were isolated empirical results verify an expansionary output effect for temporary purchases that exceeds that of permanent purchases the results for some other expectational hypotheses are found to be generally supportive of the theory

exchange rate bands with price inertia this problem by committing member states to taking suitable action to prevent cross parities from straying outside some given publicly announced range and williamson s proposal for target zones was explicitly aimed at preventing exchange rate misalignment among the principal industrial countries subsequently the louvre accord struck between members of the group of seven in i 987 involved unpublished commitments designed to constrain fluctuation between the u s dollar and the currencies of its major trading partners funabashi i988 given the obvious practical importance of understanding the implications of such policy commitments for the economy in general and the exchange rate in particular it is perhaps not surprising that the seminal work by krugman i 988 i989 on exchange rate determination within a band has aroused considerable interest under the assumption that the velocity of money follows a brownian motion process he obtains an explicit solution for the exchange rate as a function of the fundamental which shows that the presence of a commitment to intervene so as to defend the band exerts a stabilising influence on the exchange rate even before any such intervention takes place in their contribution to this emerging literature froot and obstfeld i989 note that krugman s minimalist stochastic specification can be derived from a monetary model of exchange rates where prices are perfectly flexible and full employment prevails where international interest differentials match expected exchange rate changes and the exchange rate preserves purchasing power parity cf mussa 1976 and they show that the behaviour of the rate inside a currency band can be obtained using results on regulated brownian motion processes cf harrison i985 using the same framework and techniques flood and garber i989 indicate how the rate will respond to noninfinitesimal intervention and svensson i 989 examines the effect of bandwidth on the stochastic behaviour of interest rates klein i989 considers the effects of uncertainty about the width of the band

on measuring the effects of fiscal policy in recessions we do not have a good measure of the effects of fiscal policy in a recession because the methods that we use to estimate the effects of fiscal policy both those using the observed outcomes following different policies in aggregate data and those studying counterfactuals in fitted model economies almost entirely ignore the state of the economy and estimate the government multiplier which is presumably a weighted average of the one we care about the multiplier in a recession and one we care less about the multiplier in an expansion notable exceptions to this general claim sug gest this difference is potentially large our lack of knowledge stems significantly from the focus on linear dynamics vector autoregressions and linearized or close to linear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models our lack of knowledge also reflects a lack of data deep recessions are few and nonlinearities hard to measure the lack of statistical power in the estimation of nonlinear models using aggregate data can be addressed by exploiting estimates of partial equilibrium responses in disaggregated data microeconomic estimates of the partial equilibrium causal effects of a policy can discipline the causal channels inherent in any dsge model of the general equilibrium effects of policy microeconomic studies can also provide measures of the dependence of the effects of a policy on the states of different agents which is a key component of the dependence of the general equilibrium effects of fiscal policy on the state of the

the consequences of fiscal stimulus on public debt a historical perspective the current policy agenda of neoclassical macroeconomics as expressed within conservative political circles in the uk and european union is that fiscal contraction is the lever that can bring about recovery from the current economic downturn allegedly the reason is that when business sees that the government balance sheet is improving and public debt declining there will be greater confidence in the country s economic prospects and this increased confidence will lead to higher investment this in turn will lead to growth and the road to economic recovery this study examines the impact of government stance on public debt for 11 oecd countries for which data on the relevant factors are available from 1881 to 2011 contrary to traditional predictions it turns out that over this long historical span fiscal contractions deteriorated rather than improved public debt as a percentage of gdp this implies that fiscal austerity exacerbates the lack of demand and deteriorates rather than enhances the prospects of economic recovery

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

us government deficits and debt amid the great recession what the evidence shows this paper examines three sets of major questions regarding the current u s government s fiscal defi cit and outstanding debt tied to the 2009 economic stimulus program the american recovery and reinvest ment act arra first i consider the claim that high levels of government borrowing drives up interest rates these high rates then produce a heavy burden of government debt as well as heavy inflationary pressures the evidence we review regarding each of these concerns demonstrates that none have emerged as serious matters since the enactment of the arra given this conclusion the paper then questions why the arra did not then succeed in generating a strong economic recovery i first consider the possible impact of ricardian equivalence the position that government stimulus programs by their nature are self defeating after argu ing against this position i advance three reasons for the failure of the arra to achieve a strong recovery 1 the arra relied too heavily on tax cuts as a means of bolstering private spending 2 household wealth de clined dramatically during the recession tied to the collapse of the financial bubble this in turn weakened the willingness of households to increase spending and 3 credit markets were locked up especially for smaller businesses despite the highly expansionary monetary policy stance adopted by the federal reserve building on these findings i then develop a series of policy proposals aimed at promoting both a strong recovery in the short term and at reducing any remaining structural deficit issues in the longer term the short term program focuses on extending loan guarantees especially to small businesses and taxing the excess reserves held by commercial banks the longer term agenda focuses on reducing government costs for health care and the military and on increasing revenue through establishing taxes on financial market transactions

is there a bias toward excess in u s government budgets or deficits do the political institutions of a majoritarian representative democracy and in particular those of the united states systematically produce either levels of public spending or budget deficits that are excessive should u s political institutions be altered by constitutional amendment to deal with these problems i will start by examining the issue of public spending and then turn to the question of budget deficits

an economic theory of church strictness this paper introduces spatial location models into the economics of religion we offer a new explanation for the observed tendency of state monopoly churches to locate toward the low tension end of the strictness continuum obtained through the conjunction of benevolent preferences denominations care about the aggregate utility of members and asymmetric costs of going to a more or less strict church than one prefers we derive implications regarding the relationship between religious strictness and membership religious market interactions and asymmetric costs of membership highlight new explanations for some well established stylised facts opening the way to new empirical comparisons with more traditional explanations

pay or pray the impact of charitable subsidies on religious attendance abstract the economic argument for subsidizing charitable giving relies on the positive externalities of charitable activities particularly from the religious institutions that are the largest recipients of giving but the net external effects of subsidies to religious giving will also depend on a potentially important indirect effect as well impacts on religious participation religious participation can be either a complement to or a substitute with the level of charitable giving understanding these spillover effects of charitable giving may be quite important given the existing observational literature that suggests that religiosity is a major determinant of well being among americans in this paper i investigate the impact of charitable subsidies on a measure of religious participation attendance at religious services i do so by using data over three decades from the general social survey as well as confirming the impact of such subsidies on religious giving using the consumer expenditure survey i find strong evidence that religious giving and religious attendance are substitutes larger subsidies to charitable giving lead to more religious giving but less religious attendance with an implied elasticity of attendance with respect to religious giving of as much as 1 1 these results have important implications for the debate over charitable subsidies they also serve to validate economic models of religious participation

after the fall the impact of government regulation on church attendance in eastern europe 1990 2004 previous literature modeling the demand for religion has identified socioeconomic factors religious human capital and religious market structure as being the fundamental determinants of the level of participation in religious services and practices building on the existing literature this study analyzes the effect of government regulation and intervention on religious activity using religion related data as well as demographic and economic data from 22 eastern european countries after the fall of communism the existence of any form of religious restrictions is found to reduce church attendance rates

the private provision of public goods altruism and voluntary giving abstract a unique data set on exact giving by individual households for the support of a rural health care facility is used to examine the determinants of charitable giving including the role of altruism we examine whether a household s decision to give or not give and the amount it gives are influenced in the same or different ways by the household s characteristics and economic circumstances we also examine whether a household s altruistic history affects its current giving decisions

the term structure of interest rates in a sticky price target zone model abstract the term structure of interest rates in a sticky price target zone model with perfectly credible marginal central bank intervention is identified by means of an arbitage free valuation we find that an explicit credible target zone for the exchange rate is associated with an implicit target zone for the long term interest rate where the nonlinearity of the exchange rate function translates into a corresponding stabilizing nonlinearity of the long term interest rate imposing a target zone reduces the variability of short term and long term interest rates and induces a steeper term structure relative to freely floating exchange rates

can government purchases stimulate the economy this essay briefly reviews the state of knowledge about the government spending multiplier drawing on theoretical work aggregate empirical estimates from the united states as well as cross locality estimates i assess the likely range of multiplier values for the experiment most relevant to the stimulus package debate a temporary deficit financed increase in government purchases i conclude that the multiplier for this type of spending is probably between 0 8 and 1 5 jel e23 e62 h50

government policies and financial crises mitigation postponement or prevention in the aftermath of the great recession governments have implemented several policy measures to counteract the collapse of the financial sector and the downswing of the real sector within a framework of minsky veblen cycles where relative consumption concerns a debt led growth regime and financial sector confidence constitute the main causes of economic fluctuations we use computer simulations to assess the effectiveness of such measures we find that the considered policy measures help mitigate the impact of financial crises though they do so at the cost of shortening the time between financial crises this result is due to a relatively fast recovery of solvency and confidence induced by the policy measures under study which contribute to an increase in private credit and thereby effective demand our results suggest that without the strengthening of financial regulation any policy intervention remains incomplete

exchange rate uncertainty and us bilateral fresh fruit and fresh vegetable trade an application of the gravity model in order to analyse the effect of exchange rate uncertainty we apply an empirical gravity equation to two sets of us bilateral trade data fresh fruit over the period 1976 1999 for a panel of 26 countries and fresh vegetables over the period 1976 2006 for a panel of nine countries based on panel estimation methods and using both a moving sd measure and the peree and steinherr 1989 measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results show that us bilateral fresh fruit trade has been negatively affected by exchange rate uncertainty we also find some evidence that the exchange rate between the us dollar and the currencies of latin american trading partners accounts for most of the negative impact of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral trade flows in fresh fruit in contrast when using panel estimation methods and both measures of exchange rate uncertainty we find no statistically significant evidence for any negative effect of exchange rate uncertainty on us bilateral fresh vegetable trade however

the economics of regional variation in religious attendance developments in modelling the demand for religion have identified both religious human capital and religious market structure as fundamental determinants of levels of formal religious practice in this paper these theories are confronted with survey data drawn from 163 regions across 16 countries although there are clearly political historical and other country specific factors that affect levels of participation in organized religion estimates from modified logit regression equations demonstrate the empirical significance at the regional level of variables suggested by recent innovations in the economics of religious behaviour

target zone models with price inertia solutions and testable implications many recent papers suggest that the basic flex price target zone model does not perform well empirically this paper investigates the testable implications of a sticky price target zone model and finds that to a limited extent it has a better empirical performance than the simplest flex price model however in terms of nominal variables the sticky price model is found to be observationally equivalent to the flex price model when the latter is extended to include intramarginal intervention and realignments copyright 1994 by royal economic society

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

religious freedom and the unintended consequences of state religion 1 introduction a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion so wrote justice hugo black in the majority opinion in engel v vitale 1 a 1962 school prayer case decided by the united states supreme court today church state issues continue to rise to the forefront of american politics in recent years alone disputes have arisen over public school vouchers and prayers the phrase under god in the pledge of allegiance the display of the ten commandments in public meeting halls and courthouses and the proper scope of president bush s recent faith based and community initiative across the atlantic william carey the recently retired archbishop of canterbury argued in april 2002 that establishment strengthens the church of england by allowing it to build a comprehensive network of parishes throughout the entire country and he denied that establishment has constrained the prophetic voice of the church 2 in contrast carey s successor rowan williams who became archbishop of canterbury in july 2002 has in the past advocated the disestablishment of the church of england 3 in sweden where the church of sweden had been the state church since 1593 the parliament passed a statute providing for the formal disestablishment of the church on january 1 2000 4in the united states the strongest advocates for giving religion a more prominent role in governmental settings have often been religious conservatives whereas the strongest opponents are often political liberals for example in the recently decided cleveland school voucher case 5 christian organizations like focus on the family the christian legal society the ethics and religious liberty commission of the southern baptist convention the national association of evangelicals and the united states conference of catholic bishops filed briefs in support of the program which allowed public funds to pay tuition in private schools including religious schools among the organizations filing briefs in opposition to the program were the naacp and various public education lobbies whereas the american civil liberties union people for the american way and americans united for separation of church and state provided legal representation for some of the plaintiffs challenging the voucher program interestingly however several religious organizations also filed briefs in opposition to the voucher program including the american jewish committee the jewish council for public affairs the baptist joint committee on public affairs the national council of churches of christ in the usa ncc and two regional seventh day adventist organizations except for the ncc these organizations represent the interests of religious groups that are or in the case of the baptists once were distinctly in the religious minority a growing body of research suggests that any positive benefits to the church with direct support from the state are outweighed by indirect effects that undermine the church s autonomy and its authority with the general populace for an excellent introduction to this research see stark and finke 2000 chapter 9 if such research is correct then the advocates of governmental endorsement of religion may be undermining the very institutions they seek to support in this article we use cross country survey responses to assess the impact of religious freedom and the separation of church and state on the health of religion throughout the world using survey responses on the frequency of attendance at religious services we find that government establishment of state religion reduces religious attendance whereas enduring constitutional protection of religion increases religious attendance adam smith recognized that establishment could ultimately undermine the state religion in the wealth of nations smith discussed the impact of establishing a religion on the fervor and effectiveness of the clergy in that religion the teachers of religion in the same manner as other teachers may either depend altogether for their subsistence upon the voluntary contributions of their hearers or they may derive it from some other fund to which the law of their country may entitle them such as a landed estate a tythe or land tax an established salary or stipend

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

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

church attendance in great britain an ordered logit approach the church attendance decision of individual economic agents is analysed within a becker style allocation of time framework using an ordered logit model with data derived from the british household panel study bhps separate attendance equations are estimated for males and females the empirical results in line with previous north american studies suggest that labour income variables do account for some of the variation in attendance in addition attendance is found to be correlated with factors such as denominational affiliation educational attainment and intensity of belief

the impacts of religion political ideology and social capital on religious and secular giving evidence from the 2006 social capital community survey using a double hurdle model and data from the 2006 social capital community survey sccs2006 we examine religious and secular giving focusing on the impacts of religion political ideology and social capital our main results indicate that greater participation in religious activities positively impacts religious and secular giving the intensity of religious belief increases religious giving at the expense of secular giving religious giving by very conservative individuals is higher than for other ideological groups and measures of social capital are very important in raising the level and likelihood of philanthropic giving

an empirical analysis of the revival of fiscal activism in the 2000s an empirical review of the three fiscal stimulus packages of the 2000s shows that they had little if any direct impact on consumption or government purchases households largely saved the transfers and tax rebates the federal government only increased purchases by a small amount state and local governments saved their stimulus grants and shifted spending away from purchases to transfers counterfactual simulations show that the stimulus induced decrease in state and local government purchases was larger than the increase in federal purchases simulations also show that a larger stimulus package with the same design as the 2009 stimulus would not have increased government purchases or consumption by a larger amount these results raise doubts about the efficacy of such packages adding weight to similar assessments reached more than thirty years ago jel e21 e23 e32 e62 h50

the new institutional economics and the theory of behaviour under uncertainty the new institutional economics nie is diverse in terms of the theory of behaviour under uncertainty some views are close to neoclassical economics but others are similar to those held by heterodox economists distinctions between procedural and substantive uncertainty weak and strong uncertainty and ambiguity and fundamental uncertainty help to identify different approaches to uncertainty in nie regarding the influence of institutions on economics behaviour not all nie focuses on institutions as constraints and takes individuals as given the dominant views of rationality in nie are standard neoclassical maximization and bounded rationality but alternative notions have also been defended