Religious Beliefs, Time Preference, and Financial Literacy

Religious beliefs affect individual values and behavioral decisions, this paper investigates how religious beliefs affect individual financial literacy from the perspective of cultural property by using 2013 China Household Finance Survey data. We find a positive impacts of religious beliefs on individual financial literacy, and this effect concentrates in the Buddhism faith. The financial literacy of religious believers is about 0.028 units higher than non-believers, which is equivalent to 44% of the sample average. We examine the heterogeneity effects by individual education level. If the religious believers has a college degree or above, the effects of religious belief on individual financial literacy was less if he/she had a college degree or above, and the reason is that the initial financial literacy of this group is relatively high. Furthermore, the religion makes individual behavioral decisions more “Long Term Orientation”, consistent with the time preference mechanism. Our findings are helpful to understand the interactive relationship between religious beliefs and modern economic life, and are contributive to the increasing of consumers’ financial literacy by intervention policies and the interpretation of “the craze for religion”.