The effect of Protestantism and Catholicism on economic, health and philanthropic behaviour

Religion is generally seen as an important factor for economic behaviour. This paper uses variation in religion induced by priming techniques to estimate the effects of Protestantism and Catholicism on economic, health and philanthropic behaviour. Priming is recently introduced in economic literature as a technique to estimate the marginal causal effects of social identity categories on potential outcomes. We find that Protestantism and Catholicism affect those outcomes differently. The main findings of this study are that financial risk taking is reduced by Catholic identity norms. The same is true for donating to charity organizations and trust, these variables are both negative affected by Catholic identity norms. Furthermore we find that trust is negative affected and Health related behaviour seems to be positively affected by Protestant identity norms.