Religious identity and economic behavior

"Although many scholars (e.g., Weber, 1930) have hypothesized that religious identity norms affect economic outcomes, empirical tests have been hampered by the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in religion. We create exogenous variation by randomly varying religious identity salience in laboratory subjects. The marginal effect of religious identity is the change in subjects' choices when religion is salient. We test six hypotheses from prior literature. We find that Protestantism increases contributions to public goods. Catholicism decreases contributions to public goods, decreases expectations of others' contributions to public goods, and decreases risk aversion. Judaism increases worker reciprocity in a bilateral labor market gift-exchange game. We find no evidence of religious identity effects on disutility of work effort, discount rates, or generosity in a dictator game"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.