Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide

Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann

No 5288, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 Prussian counties in 1816-21 and 1869-71, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental-variable model finds that Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide. We address issues of bias from mental illness, misreporting, weather conditions, within-county heterogeneity, religious concentration, and gender composition. Tests that discriminate between the two mechanisms based on historical church-attendance data and modern suicide data suggest that the sociological channel dominates the theological channel.

Keywords: religion; suicide; social cohesion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N33 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5288.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide (2018)
Working Paper: Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide (2018)
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:ces:ceswps:_5288

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().