On the Relationship between Religiosity, Human Capital and Income

• Autor(a) principal: Viegas, Ricardo Manuel Neves
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/6045
• topic: Capital Humano; Cresciemnto Económico; Desenvolvimento; Religião; Rendimento; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

A recent empirical literature has addressed the relationship between income and religion. The argument that links religion to income is mainly based on the positive effect religious beliefs has on labor productivity (Weberian argument) or on the negative effect that attending religious services has on decreasing labour supply. Thus human capital is the production factor which is potentially most affected by religion. Despite of that, the relationship between human capital and religion at the aggregate level has been overlooked. I present a new nonlinear influence of religious attendance by children in the formation of human capital. This relationship is robust to country heterogeneity and variable stationarity and to the existence of nonobservable beliefs. Once reverse causality is taken into account, a robust positive effect of religion on human capital subsists, in opposition to the most recent results, which seem to point to a negative effect. Most studies are based on microdata, and macroeconomic analysis of the issue that has largely ignored the potential heterogeneity between countries. Using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries between 1925 and 1990, I apply heterogeneous panel data estimators and reveal that the effect of participation in religious activities on income per capita is mostly non-significant. This is consistent with some of the recent research that casts doubt onto the influence of religion on income, once causality is taken into account.