EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

People's Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes

Luigi Guiso, Luigi Zingales and Paola Sapienza

No 3588, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people?s economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys to identify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes, controlling for country fixed effects. We study several economic attitudes toward cooperation, the government, working women, legal rules, thriftiness, and the market economy. We also distinguish across religious denominations, differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country. We find that on average, religious beliefs are associated with ?good? economic attitudes, where ?good? is defined as conducive to higher per capita income and growth. Yet religious people tend to be more racist and less favorable with respect to working women. These effects differ across religious denominations. Overall, we find that Christian religions are more positively associated with attitudes conducive to economic growth.

Keywords: Religion; Institutions; Preferences; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A10 E00 N4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3588 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: People's opium? Religion and economic attitudes (2003) Downloads
Working Paper: People's Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes (2002) Downloads
Working Paper: Peoples Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes (2002) Downloads
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:cpr:ceprdp:3588

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3588

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:3588