The Effect of Religiosity and Religious Festivals on Positional Concerns: An Experimental Investigation of Ramadan

Alpaslan Akay (), Gokhan Karabulut and Peter Martinsson
Additional contact information
Alpaslan Akay: University of Gothenburg

No 6172, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper 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. We also discuss the broader welfare implications of our findings.

Keywords: Ramadan; positional concerns; religion; Islam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cul and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Applied Economics, 2013, 45 (27), 3914-3921

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6172.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of religiosity and religious festivals on positional concerns -- an experimental investigation of Ramadan (2013)
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:iza:izadps:dp6172

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().