Individual’s religiosity enhances trust: Latin American evidence for the puzzle

Pablo Brañas-Garza, Maximo Rossi and Dayna Zaclicever ()
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Dayna Zaclicever: Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República

No 506, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: This paper explores the effect of religious observance and affiliation to the dominant religion (Catholicism) on trust in institutions, towards others and market attitudes. The analysis is performed using a Latin American database of twenty thousand respondents from 2004 by means of ordered probit models. The most interesting results are: i) Trust toward others is positively correlated with religious observance and with Catholic affiliation. ii) There is a positive correlation between trust in the government, in the police, in the armed forces, in the judiciary and in the banking system and religious practice in general. Identical positive results are obtained for Catholic affiliation. iii) Correlations with attitudes toward the market, in general, are heterogeneous but never negative. In sum, individual’s level of religiosity crucially affects trust in institutions and toward peers. We also found that Catholicism encourages both trust in institutions and towards others. Thus, we found a positive effect of “religiosity” on social capital. In fact, we never found any negative (and significant) effect on the variables considered.

Keywords: trust in institutions; economic behavior; religious practise; Catholics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-lam and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/2047 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Individual's Religiosity Enhances Trust: Latin American Evidence for the Puzzle (2009)
Journal Article: Individual's Religiosity Enhances Trust: Latin American Evidence for the Puzzle (2009)
Working Paper: Individual s religiosity enhances trust: Latin American evidence for the puzzle (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:0506

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