Religion and the Family: The Case of the Amish

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: I construct a model of religion as an institution that provides community enforcement of contracts within families. Family altruism implies that family members cannot commit to reporting broken contracts to the community, so the community must monitor contract performance as well as in icting punishment. The community has less information than family members, and so community monitoring is ine cient. I provide evidence from a study of Amish institutions, including qualitative evidence from sociological accounts and quantitative evidence from a novel dataset covering nearly the entire Amish population of Holmes county, Ohio. I nd that 1) Amish households are not unitary, 2) the Amish community helps to support families by in icting punishments on wayward family members, 3) without the community Amish people have di culty committing to punishing family members, and 4) Amish community membership strengthens family ties, while otherwise similar religious communities in which there is less need for exchange between family members have rules that weaken family ties. My model has implications for understanding selection into religious practice and the persistence of culture.

Keywords: Cultural Economics; Non-market Production; Public Goods; Religion JEL Classification: D13; H4; Z10; Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-soc
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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... ns/267-2016_choy.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Religion and the Family: The Case of the Amish (2016)
Working Paper: Religion and the Family: The Case of the Amish (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:267

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