Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP12622
Authors: David de la Croix; Clara Delavallade
Abstract: We investigate the extent to which religions' pronatalism is detrimental to growth via the fertility/education channel. Using censuses from South-East Asia, we first estimate an empirical model of fertility and show that having a religious affiliation significantly raises fertility, especially for couples with intermediate to high education levels. We next use these estimates to identify the parameters of a structural model of fertility choice. On average, Catholicism is the most pro-child religion (increasing total spending on children), followed by Buddhism, while Islam has a strong pro-birth component (redirecting spending from quality to quantity). We show that pro-child religions depress growth in the early stages of growth by lowering savings, physical capital, and labor supply. These effects account for 10% to 30% of the actual growth gaps between countries over 1950-1980. At later stages of growth, pro-birth religions lower human capital accumulation, explaining between 10% to 20% of the growth gap between Muslim and Buddhist countries over 1980-2010.
Keywords: quality-quantity trade-off; catholicism; buddhism; islam; indirect inference; education
JEL Codes: J13; Z13; O11
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| religious affiliation (Z12) | fertility rates (J13) |
| Catholicism (Z12) | total spending on children (J13) |
| Buddhism (Z12) | total spending on children (J13) |
| Islam (P40) | spending behavior (D12) |
| pro-child religions (J13) | economic growth (O49) |
| pro-birth religions (Z12) | human capital accumulation (J24) |