The impact of exogenous shocks on exits from the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, 1953–2015

ABSTRACT

In Germany, exits from the Catholic and Protestant churches have fluctuated considerably over the last 60 years. Much of the observable variation in these exits can be explained by exogenous shocks such as unpopular encyclicals by the Pope, German reunification, sexual abuse cases and financial scandals.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• taxes
• exogenous shocks

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H22
• L31
• Z12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.​​​​

Notes

¹ Lyytikäinen and Santavirta (2013) find that in Finland church exits are concentrated towards the last days of the year because this is the last chance to avoid paying taxes for the entire next year.

² We have carefully checked for potentially confounding effects (i.e. other events that might have contributed to the observed changes in church exits) and can rule these out entirely. Thus, we are confident that our estimated coefficients are not biased in either direction.

³ Bottan and Perez-Truglia (2015) and Hungerman (2013) report similar responses of church members to sexual abuse scandals in the United States.

⁴ The findings presented by Engelberg et al. (2016) suggest that churches use their pastors efficiently by rotating poor performers and moving high performers to larger parishes.