Essays on faith and finance

This dissertation consists of three essays on the impact of religion on economic choices in the context of an emerging market. The first essay provides an overview of the rapidly growing Islamic finance industry as an example of the continued economic relevance of religious preferences. The second essay uses proprietary panel data on the distribution of bank deposits across all commercial banks in Pakistan to show that Islamic banks enjoy substantially higher deposit growth rates than other banks and that this difference persists even after various other determinants of bank demand are taken into account. The third essay combines different empirical approaches and uses a unique dataset of customer level information to determine some of the reasons behind the difference in demand for faith based and conventional financial assets.