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Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial sacrifices and this leads the religious to prefer making their contributions voluntarily rather than through mandatory means. To the extent that citizen preferences are reflected in policy outcomes, religiosity results in lower taxes, which in turn implies lower levels of spending on both public goods and redistribution. Since measures of income typically do not fully take into account the part of income coming from donations received, this increases measured income inequality. We formalize these ideas in a general equilibrium political economy model and also show that the implications of our model are supported by cross-country data.

This paper investigates the evolution of systemic risk in the Turkish banking sector over the past two decades using comovement of banks' stock returns as a systemic risk indicator. In addition, we explore possible determinants of systemic risk, the knowledge of which can be a useful input into effective macroprudential policymaking. Results show that the correlations between bank stock returns almost doubled in 2000s in comparison to 1990s. The correlations decreased somewhat after 2002 and increased again as a result of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Main determinants of systemic risk appear to be the market share of bank pairs, the amount of non-performing loans, herding behavior of banks, and volatilities of macro variables including the exchange rate, U.S. T-bills, EMBI+, VIX, and MSCI emerging markets index.