Journal of Economics, Management and Religion

In Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create A More Just Economy, Anthony Annett provides an account of Catholic social teaching, mainly encapsulated in papal encyclicals from 1891 to the present day, as a value system for economic policy-making in the contemporary world. He argues that values and ethical principles embedded in Catholic social teaching are a better basis for economic policy than the frameworks of “neoclassical” or “neoliberal” economics, with respect to goals such as human rights, inequality and environmental protection. This review evaluates Annett’s arguments in the context of other approaches to providing moral foundations for economic policy, and with respect to the state of current economic thinking. It also considers issues embedded in the difference between “religious economics” and the “economics of religion,” the role of religious reasons in public policy, and underlying conditions of power.

Religion, ethnicity, and political ideology all lend themselves to the perpetration of mass atrocities by creating a sense of identity that sets up an Us/Them dichotomy. Atrocities are modelled here as arising from the motive of acquiring territory but augmented by other-regarding preferences that capture the role of identity. My empirical results using data for the period 1800–2020 confirm that all these identity-driven motivators are associated with mass atrocities, with religion being more powerful than ethnicity. Monotheistic religions (with the strong exception of Judaism) are seen to be associated with more mass atrocity deaths than (polytheistic) Hinduism, lending partial credibility to Hume’s (1757/2010) view on the intolerance of monotheism. While democracies are associated with fewer mass atrocities than autocracies, Christian liberal democracies are not. My statistical analysis rejects the popular presumption that Islam is more violent than Christianity. In fact, in the post-World War II (WWII) era, among the major religions Christianity has been associated with the most mass atrocity deaths. The results also show that mass deaths were higher in atrocities that took place in settler colonies, especially in the post-WWII period of decolonisation. Using mass atrocities as the metric of violence, the correlations found in the empirical work of this paper offer many new and surprising findings.

There has been a surge in concern about political polarization and discrimination based on religious and political attitudes in the workplace. Using a nationally-representative sample of nearly 3,000 respondents, this paper presents new empirical evidence on the incidence of social hostilities in the workplace and the causal effects of providing information on consumer and labor market behavior across a range of indicators. Several empirical patterns emerge. First, nearly half of respondents have not shared their personal views about a social or political issue because of fear that sharing it would harm their career. Second, roughly a fifth of respondents have encountered discrimination for respectfully communicating their religious or political viewpoint. Third, these attitudes are negatively correlated with labor market and social media behavior: 40% of respondents say that perceptions of hostility against religious or political views make them much less likely to apply to a company, and 50% of respondents say that they are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about adverse effects related with posting on social media about their religious and political attitudes. Finally, exposure to information about politicized topics is associated with a decline in respondents’ support for companies taking more activist stances. These results suggest that there are adverse and unintended consequences associated with religious and political discrimination, and companies could realize additional benefits by focusing on their core business activities.