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Abstract
Spiritual capital is relatively an emerging field of
economics. Recent developments in the subfields of economics such as economics of
religion (Iannaccone), divine economics (Hamdani), behavioral economics, brain
scan economics and other social sciences had helped in finding the economic effects
of different religious behaviors. Yet exists a long-felt need for a better
understanding of spiritual capital (Iannoconne 1990, Iannoconne and Klick 2003,
Hamdani 2006).
Studies are now available , for example, majority of Americans
think themselves as more spiritual than religious but these studies lack a
clear distinction of spirituality and religiosity as most of them assume that
being religious and being spiritual is same [Zinnbauer (1997), Roof (2000),
Scott (2001), and Marler and Hadaway (2002)].
While some economists like Finke (2003), and Iannocone and Klick (2003) attempted
to define spiritual capital, however, their definitions still need more
refinement for achieving a clear distinction between the concept of religious
capital and spiritual capital. The works of Zohar and Marshall (2004) , Rima (2005),
and Liu (2007) have offered some advancement in this regard. But defining and analyzing
spiritual human capital as a further branch of social or human capital is still
unexplored.
The present paper focuses on defining spiritual human
capital and its different types [Berger and Hefner (2004], by utilizing the
teachings of three divine religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which
more than three billion people follow on
earth. A priori, on the basis of theoretical underpinning in Hamdani (2007), we
hypothesize that different kinds of spiritual capital exists in
different religions and sects. It is further hypothesized that different kinds
of spiritual capital are likely to systematically affect the economic decision
making of the individuals and hence create different intensities, directions,
and magnitudes of spiritual human capital. The present study finds that
spiritual human capital can be classified, accumulated, earned, and used at
later time just like other forms of human capital. However, the determination
of exact dimension and magnitude of spiritual human capital is only a partial
objective of the present paper. For this purpose, cross section data available
by Divine Economics Survey 2000 shall be used for the analysis.
Keywords: Divine Economics, spiritual capital,
spiritual human capital, religiosity, foregone income.
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