Love Thy Neighbor: Religion and Prosocial Behavior

Guido Heineck

No 8496, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There is a long tradition in psychology, the social sciences and, more recently though, economics to hypothesize that religion enhances prosocial behavior. Evidence from both survey and experimental data however yield mixed results and there is barely any evidence for Germany. This study adds to this literature by exploring data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which provides both attitudinal (importance of helping others, of being socially active) and behavioral components of prosociality (volunteering, charitable giving and blood donations). Results from analyses that avoid issues of reverse causality suggest mainly for moderate, positive effects of individuals' religious involvement as measured by church affiliation and church attendance. Despite the historic divide in religion, results in West and East Germany do not differ substantially.

Keywords: Germany; prosocial behavior; religion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 Z12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-ltv and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Forthcoming - revised version published in: International Journal of Social Economics, 2017, 44(7), 869 - 883

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8496.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Love Thy Neighbor: Religion and Prosocial Behavior (2014)
Working Paper: Love thy neighbor: Religion and prosocial behavior (2014)
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:dp8496

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 ().