Does Religiosity Promote Property Rights and the Rule of Law?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractSocial and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of law. Previous studies have only measured the impact of membership shares of different religions, with mixed results. We find, in a cross-country regression analysis comprising up to 112 countries, that religiosity is negatively related to our institutional outcome variables. This only holds in democracies (not autocracies), which suggests that religiosity affects the way institutions work through the political process. Individual religions are not related to our measure of institutional quality.

Human capital and national institutional quality: Are TIMSS, PISA, and national average IQ robust predictors?

“…5 Countries with French and Socialist legal origin have less secure property rights than countries with British legal origin. These results are perfectly in line with previous findings (Berggren & Bjørnskov 2013;Glaeser & Shleifer, 2002;Kalonda-Kanyama, 2014;La Porta et al, 1999).…”

“…Average years of total schooling are measured as of the year 2005, from the Barro-Lee database. 4 Log GDP per capita is included because log GDP per capita has been shown to be positively correlated with property rights (Berggren & Bjørnskov, 2013). Likewise education is included because national IQ scores could be purely a side-effect of education, and because if one is testing the hypothesis that "human capital" influences institutional quality, years of education are a competing index of human capital that could conceivably be a force generating higher-quality institutions.…”

Environment and economic growth: is the rule of law the go-between? The case of high-income countries

“…Although some studies take into account the rule of law [23][24][25], to the best of our knowledge, there are very few works [26,27,15] that analyze this institution from an environmental perspective. As for the choice of the pollutant, we concentrate our attention to carbon dioxide, which is one of the most considered energy-related pollutant and a major source of the greenhouse effect.…”

How beliefs influence behaviour: Confucianism and innovation in China

“…They find evidence of religiosity being associated with a significantly less favourable opinion of innovation. Also, Berggren and Bjornskov (2013) analyse how the relative importance of religion in daily life affect institutional quality as measured by property rights and rule of law. They find that religiosity is negatively associated with these institutional outcome variables, suggesting that religion has a detrimental effect on institutions that are typically regarded as important for the rate of innovation (e.g.…”

“…Using various measures for both variables, they find that religiosity is clearly associated with a less favourable opinion of innovation. Moreover, Berggren and Bjornskov (2013) identify a negative relationship between religiosity and institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of law. As a large literature has shown that the quality of these forms of institutions is crucial for innovation, Berggren and Bjornskov's findings suggest that religiosity indirectly affect innovation by being detrimental to institutional development.…”