Is God in the Details? A Reexamination of the Role of Religion in Economic Growth

Steven Durlauf, Andros Kourtellos () and Chih Ming Tan

University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics

Abstract: Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. Overall, their analysis generally meets the standard of statistical replicability, though not perfectly. On the other hand, we do not find that their results are robust to changes in their baseline statistical specification. When model averaging methods are employed to integrate information across alternative statistical specifications, little evidence survives that religious variables help to predict cross-country income differences.

Keywords: Economic Growth; Religion; Model Uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-mac and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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https://papers.econ.ucy.ac.cy/RePEc/papers/11-10.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is God in the details? A reexamination of the role of religion in economic growth (2012)
Working Paper: Is God in the Details? A Reexamination of the Role of Religion in Economic Growth (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucy:cypeua:11-2010

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