Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide
47 Pages Posted: 20 Jun 2011
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Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide
Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide
Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide
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.
Keywords: religion, suicide, Prussian economic history
JEL Classification: Z12, N33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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