In Persona Christi Capitis: Agency Problems When God is the Principal

The in persona Christi Capitis doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church guarantees the validity of its sacraments, irrespective of the personal morality of the priest who performs them. While this protects their value as metacredence goods, it seemingly opens the door to opportunistic behaviour by the clergy. To balance out its institutional incentives, the Roman Catholic Church must rigorously screen its candidates for the priesthood. Historical evidence supports our hypothesis that the development of the in persona Christi Capitis doctrine was accompanied by marginal increases in the screening of seminarians, which may have been an optimal response to changing historical circumstances. Also consistent with our hypothesis, a cross section of contemporary Christian denominations shows a correlation between a group’s stance on sacramental theology and the strictness of its screening of candidates to religious ministry.

Religious, Civil, and Economic Freedoms: What’s the Chicken and What’s the Egg?

This paper studies the relationship between religious liberty and economic freedom. First, three new facts emerge: (a) religious liberty has increased since 1960, but has slipped substantially over the past decade; (b) the countries that experienced the largest declines in religious liberty tend to have greater economic freedom, especially property rights; (c) changes in religious liberty are associated with changes in the allocation of time to religious activities. Second, using a combination of vector autoregressions and dynamic panel methods, improvements in religious liberty tend to precede economic freedom. Finally, increases in religious liberty have a wide array of spillovers that are important determinants of economic freedom and explain the direction of causality. Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

Ethnic Identity in American History and America’s Exceptional Religiosity: Theory and Some Evidence

Why is religiosity in contemporary America exceptionally high relative to those in other rich countries? I develop a simple theory that hinges on the sense of security of immigrant-identity, which is informed by both religion and ethnicity. Commitments to religion and to ethnicity are complementary in the determination of identity, and immigrants consciously invest in the endogenous component of their sense of identity through the actions they choose (like socialising with an ethnic group or performing religious activities). I demonstrate that the level of religiosity increases with the extent of ethnic fractionalisation in the society. I offer some empirical evidence for the theory using contemporary cross-sectional data from the 50 states of the US. I test this theory against two alternative theories that have been offered to explain the high American religiosity. I find a robust positive and statistically significant correlation between religiosity and state-level ethnic fractionalisation. When tested with world data, the model is rejected — lending further support for the claim that America’s religiosity derives from its unique history of exceptionally high and ethnically diverse immigration.

An Investigation Into Religious Peer Effects

The communal nature of religion suggests peer effects exist in religiosity, potentially through positive spillovers in religious participation and social formation of religious beliefs. Using seven measures of religiosity, we estimate positive and negative peer effects in each case using peer group composition. We use a simultaneous equation model to account for self-selection into religious peer groups, and while we find positive peer effects are insignificant, there are significant negative peer effects operating through non-religious friends. This suggests peers affect social formation of religious beliefs, rather than through positive spillovers in religious participation.

The Pentecostal Gender Paradox: Pentecostalism and Intimate Partner Violence in Ghana

Pentecostalism is large, influential, and growing quickly in Ghana. This growth has been argued to benefit women due to the religion’s teachings on individualism and use of female leaders. However, the religion’s focus on female submissiveness may also present a challenge to women. Whilst this theoretical paradox has been largely untested, Gundersen (Gundersen, S (2018). Will god make me rich? An investigation into the relationship between membership in Charismatic churches, wealth, and women’s empowerment in Ghana. Religions, 9(6), 195) finds that women who identify as Pentecostal exhibit less decision-making power than other Christians when it comes to big household purchases and their own health care. Using the 2008 and 2014 Demographic Health Surveys, this study examines the relationship between Pentecostalism and intimate partner violence in Ghana. Women who identify as Pentecostal are more likely to have experienced physical violence than other women, but this effect may disappear for women in the highest wealth quintiles. Higher wealth Pentecostal women are also less likely to believe a husband is justified in hitting his wife. Thus, it seems wealth may have a protective effect for Pentecostal women in Ghana.

The Institutional Foundations of Religious Freedom

How did religious freedom emerge? I address this question by building on the framework of Johnson and Koyama’s Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (2019). First, I establish that premodern societies, reliant on identity rules, were incapable of liberalism and religious freedom. Identity rules and restrictions on religious freedom were part of a political-economy equilibrium that ensured social order. Second, I examine developments like the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, as shocks to this premodern identity rules and conditional toleration equilibrium. Finally, I consider several examples that support the claim that the move from identity rules to general rules allowed religious freedom to flourish.

Does Religion Nudge People to Donate? Evidence from Ramadan

This paper examines whether religious practices nudge people to donate. We carried out our study by focusing on the month of Ramadan, which is considered a sacred month by Muslims around the world. The results show that Ramadan has a significant effect on the amount of donations. Moreover, those who observe Ramadan have significantly increased their probability of donating and the amount of donation in Ramadan.

Economics of the Sacramental Bread Ordeal in the Russian Princedoms Period

The paper analyses the economics behind the ordeal by sacramental bread — a method of criminal dispute resolution in the Russian Princedoms period. Contributing to the framework advanced by Leeson (2011, 2012a, 2012b) [Trial by battle. Journal of Legal Analysis, 3(1), 341–375; An Austrian approach to law and economics, with special reference to superstition. The Review of Austrian Economics, 25(3), 185–198; Ordeals. The Journal of Law and Economics, 55(3), 691–714], this paper advances a hypothesis that the ordeal could have been designed as a ‘pressure valve’ to reduce scepticism in relation to other ordeals. To prove this, a model is constructed showing that when high scepticism causes fixed-outcome ordeals to become costly, the clergy could resort to creating an ordeal, the verdicts of which would not be argued against through a careful manipulation of its costs and benefits. In this ordeal, guilt was determined by the proband’s inability to swallow the bread due to stress and thus relied on a biological reaction instead of a predetermined outcome. Investigations showed that even if the ordeal delivered false verdicts, appealing the verdict was not beneficial to the proband. This was achieved by only employing the ordeal in resolution of petty theft, which made the potential losses from a false verdict very minimal. Further, the ordeal was staged as a confession, which reduced the possibility of a proband facing social ostracism.

Religiosity and Long-Run Productivity Growth

In this paper, we show, using a panel of developed countries, that there is a long-run negative association between church attendance and total factor productivity (TFP) with predictive causality running from declining church attendance to increasing factor productivity. According to our preferred estimate, about 18% of the increase in TFP from 1950 to 1990 can be motivated by declining religiosity. In order to explain this phenomenon, we integrate into standard R&D-based growth theory a micro-foundation of individual cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. Under the assumption that R&D productivity is positively influenced by a reflective-analytical cognitive style, we find that secularisation leads to an increasing labour share in R&D and gradually increasing productivity growth. We use these insights to reflect on the trends in religiosity and R&D-based growth in the very long run, from Enlightenment to the present day.

Labour-Market Integration by Responding to Work Motives: Lessons from a Study of Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Women

Low employability among specific populations (e.g. religious/traditional women, the elderly, disabled workers, and immigrants) has unfavourable consequences on the unemployed individual, society, and the state economy. The latter include poverty, a heavy toll on welfare budgets, diminished growth, and an increase in the ‘dependency ratio’. We suggest a rather novel policy (borrowed from the field of Vocational Psychology) that could lead to successful integration into the labour market of low-employability populations: The design of tailor-made training programmes that respond to work motives, coupled with a working environment that caters to special needs/restrictions, and complemented with counselling and monitoring. The suggested strategy is illustrated using a case study of Israeli ultra-Orthodox women, who exhibit lower employment rates than other Israeli women. The motives behind their occupational choices are explored based on data collected by a survey. Factor Analysis is employed to sort out the motives behind their occupational choices, and regression analysis is used to associate job satisfaction with work motivation. Policy implications are suggested based on the findings. There is already some evidence on the successful outcomes of the proposed strategy.