Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Savings and religion II

Various religions have different prescription on how rich people should be. Early Christians advocated low wealth and much redistribution, modern American Protestants seem to lean more towards wealth accumulation and little redistribution, to cite some extremes. What impact does religion have on savings behavior? Of course, nowadays it matters how religious people are. Conditional on a high level of religiosity, the religious affiliation should then matter. Earlier work using the PSID yields results that are puzzling to me: atheists save less.

Can new work by the same author, now going by the name of Anja Köbrich León, with the same dataset be illuminating? Well, not quite. In fact, the results do not seem to be robust across econometric methods, indicating some serious endogeneity issues, as has been hinted in the comments of the first post. So there, I had good reason to be puzzled.

PS: the earlier work is not cited in the extensive literature review. Is Anja hiding something here?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't think the PS is that surprising. The article is clearly a revised version of the earlier one. Do you cite every intermediate draft of a paper that evolved over several years? I usually don't.

Zuppi said...

Well, normally, religious people are more "trascendental" in two ways: they believe in afterlife and they tend to have more children (another way to trascend one's life).
Couldn't it be that ateist do have less children and so they save less? Children are a very powerful reason to save money!

Vilfredo said...

One should have at least the decency of mentioning that this paper supersedes an earlier paper. The earlier one is still available and some people may believe its wrong results.