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Is God in the Details? A Reexamination of the Role of Religion in Economic Growth

Author Info

  • Steven N. Durlauf
  • Andros Kourtellos
  • Chih Ming Tan

Abstract

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. Overall, their analysis generally meets the standard of statistical replicability, though not perfectly. On the other hand, we do not find that their results are robust to changes in their baseline statistical specification. When model averaging methods are employed to integrate information across alternative statistical specifications, little evidence survives that religious variables help to predict cross-country income differences.

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File URL: http://papers.econ.ucy.ac.cy/RePEc/papers/11-10.pdf
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Paper provided by University of Cyprus Department of Economics in its series University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics with number 11-2010.

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Length: 33 pages
Date of creation: Nov 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ucy:cypeua:11-2010
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.econ.ucy.ac.cy

Keywords: Economic Growth; Religion; Model Uncertainty;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • C59 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Other
  • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General
  • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion

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  1. Winford H. Masanjala & Chris Papageorgiou, 2008. "Rough and lonely road to prosperity: a reexamination of the sources of growth in Africa using Bayesian model averaging," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(5), pages 671-682.
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  23. repec:rus:hseeco:70719 is not listed on IDEAS
  24. Gernot Doppelhofer & Ronald I. Miller & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2000. "Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (Bace) Approach," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 266, OECD Publishing.
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