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Does religiosity make you happy? Many studies document positive associations between religiosity and various forms of subjective wellbeing. This is also true for general life satisfaction in normal economic conditions and in the case of economic shocks. However, both life satisfaction and religiosity may be correlated with unobserved individual and household traits or unobserved life shocks which can relate to reverse causality. These facts result in endogeneity and make ordinary least square estimates biased. In our study, we employ two methods to avoid possible endogeneity issues -we use fixed effects and instrumental variable estimations. Using Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) data and different econometric models, we document positive associations between religiosity and life satisfaction. In particular, fixed effect and instrumental variable regressions provide evidence for a positive effect of religiosity.JEL classification: D10, Z12.

This paper studies whether a pension reform, namely a switch from a payas-you-go (PAYG) to a more-funded scheme should be announced. We show that such an announcement increases savings, leading to a decline in interest rates. Smaller returns to savings lead to higher losses for the first transitional generation, which suffers from the reform the most. On the other hand, higher savings by the first transitional generation lead to faster capital accumulation, which benefits younger generations. We argue that if a government cares about the agents with the most to lose, it may more beneficial not to announce such a reform.JEL Classification: E13, E21, H55

The main goal of our paper is to determine the existence of a link between government (military) expenditures and the shadow economy in the Central and Eastern European countries, which are the members of the European Union. The empirical investigation is conducted for the years 2003–2015. We show that there is a high statistically significant positive dependence between the size of the shadow economy and military expenditures in the Baltic States. Our conclusion is that higher military expenditures indeed lead to a larger shadow economy and this result is robust to different model specifications. In order to demonstrate the importance of our results, we undertook a simulation, where we calculated how much the size of the shadow economy would increase if the size of military expenditure as a percentage of GDP were to double. For example, in the Czech Republic, such an expansion would have led to an increase in the size of the shadow economy from 11.50% to 12.96%, and in Estonia, from 18.34% to 22.72% in 2012.