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ifo Institut – Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung an der Universität München >
CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich >
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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/46306
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| Title: | | Knocking on heaven's door? Protestantism and suicide  |
| Authors: | | Becker, Sascha O. Woessmann, Ludger |
| Issue Date: | | 2011 |
| Series/Report no.: | | CESifo working paper: Labour Markets 3499 |
| Abstract: | | We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man's impact on God's grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 counties in 19th-century Prussia, when religiousness was still pervasive. Our instrumental-variable model exploits the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg to circumvent selectivity bias. Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide in 1816-21 and 1869-71. We address issues of bias from mental illness, misreporting, weather conditions, within-county heterogeneity, religious concentration, and gender composition. |
| Subjects: | | religion suicide Prussian economic history |
| JEL: | | Z12 N33 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich
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