Does religion belief matter to self-employment of rural elderly? Evidence from China

There is a growing interest in understanding the economic consequences of religious belief. Using a unique dataset collected from thousands of villages, this research investigates the effect of religious beliefs on rural elderlies’ self-employment choice in China. The empirical results show that, self-employment is positively associated with religious beliefs after controlling for village characteristics, which implying that religion plays a significantly positive role in promoting self-employment of rural elderly. We also find that, the self-employment promoting effects are more significant in Christians and Buddhists. This result is consistent and robust after using instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching approach and controlling for the alternative hypothesis variables. Furthermore, elderly religious believers who are female, over 70 years old, living in a village where the secondary industry is dominant and soybeans/potatoes the main crops are more likely to became self-employees. Mechanism analysis shows economic rationality rather than value rationality that religious belief influence self-employment which confirms economic compensation channel. Given the few studies and limited dataset resources in the context of rural revitalization in China, this paper put effort to provides new evidences of the relationship between religious belief and self-employment.