学術雑誌論文

学術雑誌論文

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 2025, 229, p. 106823

Religion as an informal institution: A case of true pure land Buddhism and missing women in early modern Japan

Ishise, Hirokazu

Elsevier B.V.

英語

2025-01-01

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106823

Ishise H. Religion as an informal institution: A case of true pure land Buddhism and missing women in early modern Japan. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 229, 106823 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106823.

In early modern Japan, infanticide was used for birth control and sex selection. However, some historians hypothesized that people who believed in the True Pure Land (TPL) sect of Japanese Buddhism were less likely to commit infanticide. I statistically examine this hypothesis using a quasi-natural experiment of hinoeuma (fire-horse) year with a two-way fixed-effects estimation. Girls born in a hinoeuma year were reckoned to be inauspicious and subjected to sex-selective infanticide. In 1846 and 1906 hinoeuma, TPL-dominant areas experienced a smaller increase in the male-to-female ratio in the cohort than the areas with less TPL dominance. Additional regressions support the hypothesis that the TPL's prohibition of infanticide led to this smaller effect.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

100216

Religion as an informal institution: A case of true pure land Buddhism and missing women in early modern Japan

Ishise, Hirokazu

Elsevier B.V.

英語

2025-01-01

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

229

106823

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106823

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/100216