TY - JOUR AU - Guiso,Luigi AU - Sapienza,Paola AU - Zingales,Luigi TI - People's Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 9237 PY - 2002 Y2 - September 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9237 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9237.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Luigi Guiso European University Institute Economics Department Villa San Paolo 50133 Florence ITALY Fax: 39-055-4685-902 E-Mail: luigi.guiso@eui.eu Paola Sapienza Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847/491-7436 Fax: 847/491-5719 E-Mail: paola-sapienza@northwestern.edu Luigi Zingales Booth School of Business The University of Chicago 5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/702-3196 Fax: 773/834-2081 E-Mail: luigi.zingales@ChicagoBooth.edu AB - Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people's economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys to identify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes, controlling for country fixed effects. We study several economic attitudes toward cooperation, the government, working women, legal rules, thriftiness, and the market economy. We also distinguish across religious denominations, differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country. We find that on average, religious beliefs are associated with good' economic attitudes, where good' is defined as conducive to higher per capita income and growth. Yet religious people tend to be more racist and less favorable with respect to working women. These effects differ across religious denominations. Overall, we find that Christian religions are more positively associated with attitudes conducive to economic growth. ER -