（通讯员：杨莹莹 审核人：齐航）近日，我院教师鲁维洁博士以湖北经济学院为第一署名机构、以第二字母序与合作者完成的论文《Religiosity and financial distress of the young》在线发表于Journal of Banking & Finance (Volume 168, November 2024)。Journal of Banking & Finance （简称“JBF”）由Elsevier出版，主要发表银行与金融等领域的理论和实证论文，期刊收录于SSCI，为国际学术界公认的金融领域的高质量期刊（JCR分区Q2、中科院分区2区、ABS三星），刊物的影响因子为3.6。
摘要：Financial distress is a prevalent issue among the youth. An influential stream of literature has argued that religion wields significant influence over human life. Using a representative sample of U.S. young people, we explore whether religiosity matters for financial distress. To deal with endogeneity issue, we exploit arguably exogeneous within-school variation in adolescents’ peers. By instrumenting an adolescent's own religiosity with the religiosity of their school peer group, we find that higher levels of religiosity causally and significantly reduce the likelihood of financial distress at young adulthood. Our results withstand a variety of robustness checks. To shed light on the mechanisms, we explore the impact of religiosity on an individual's sociability and various psychological attributes. We find that more religious individuals hold higher levels of self-control, a crucial attribute that aids in averting financial distress. Our study contributes to the literature by providing rigorous causal evidence that identifies religiosity as a meaningful predictor of reduced financial distress among young adults.
