Religiosity and income: A panel cointegration and causality analysis

Dierk Herzer and Holger Strulik

No 168, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1925 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality. We show that there exists a negative long-run relationship between the level of religiosity, measured by church attendance, and the level of income, measured by the log of GDP per capita. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, sample selection, different measures of church attendance, and alternative specifications of the income variable. Long-run causality runs in both directions, higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income.

Keywords: religiosity; church attendance; income; panel cointegration; causality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 N30 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Religiosity and income: a panel cointegration and causality analysis (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:168

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