IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/245.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Aging, Proximity to Death, and Religiousness

Author

Listed:
  • Lechler, Marie

    (LMU Munich)

  • Sunde, Uwe

    (LMU Munich)

Abstract

Considerable evidence has documented that the elderly are more religious and that religiousness is associated with better health and lower mortality. Yet, little is known about the reverse role of life expectancy or proximity to death, as opposed to age, for religiousness. This paper provides evidence for the distinct role of expected remaining life years for the importance of religion in individuals’ lives. We combine individual survey response data for more than 311,000 individuals from 95 countries over the period 1994-2014 with information from period life tables. Contrary to wide-held beliefs, religiousness decreases with greater expected proximity to death. The findings have important implications regarding the consequences of population aging for religiousness and associated outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Lechler, Marie & Sunde, Uwe, 2020. "Aging, Proximity to Death, and Religiousness," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 245, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:245
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/245.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Religiousness; demographics; proximity of death; remaining life years;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J10 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - General
    • N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:245. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.