Is God in the details? A reexamination of the role of religion in economic growth

Abstract

SUMMARY Barro and McCleary (2003, Religion and economic growth across countries. American Journal of Sociology 68: 760–781) 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. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Does religious beliefs affect economic growth? Evidence from provincial-level panel data in China

“…For example, Durlauf, Kourtellos, and Tan (2012) use the BMA (Bayesian Model Averaging) method to study the robustness of the conclusion of Barro and McCleary (2003). They find that the results are not robust to changes in the baseline model specifications.…”

Does Religion Affect Economic Growth and Happiness? Evidence from Ramadan

“…4 For instance, Barro and McCleary (2003) and McCleary and Barro (2006) find a positive relationship between economic growth and religious beliefs such as belief in hell. For skeptical takes on this result, see Durlauf, Kourtellos, andTan (2012) andYoung (2009). 5 In particular, those studies tend to find a negative coefficient for Muslim adherence in regressions focusing on growth or institutional development.…”

Income and religion: a heterogeneous panel data analysis

“…Additionally, reverse causality is not corrected for in an effective way. Using Bayesian model averaging methods to account for uncertainty Durlauf et al (2012) also replicate the results of Barro and McCleary (2003) to test its robustness. The relationship between religion (proxied by religions beliefs) and economic growth breaks down in this context.…”