Knocking on Heaven’s Door? Protestantism and Suicide

Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann

No 270758, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man’s impact on God’s grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 counties in 19th - century Prussia, when religiousness was still pervasive. Our instrumental-variable model exploits the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg to circumvent selectivity bias. Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide in 1816-21 and 1869-71. We address issues of bias from mental illness, misreporting, weather conditions, within-county heterogeneity, religious concentration, and gender composition.

Keywords: Financial; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46
Date: 2011-06-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270758/files/twerp_966.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270758/files/twerp_966.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide (2011)
Working Paper: Knocking on Heaven?s Door? Protestantism and Suicide (2011)
Working Paper: Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide (2011)
Working Paper: Knocking on Heaven’s Door? Protestantism and Suicide (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uwarer:270758

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.270758

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().