This study extends the extant literature on executive pay dispersion by exploring the cultural-cognitive social determinants. We investigate how religious institutional environments, including Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutions, shape vertical executive pay dispersion. We theorize that a Buddhism-based institutional environment is negatively related to vertical executive pay dispersion. In contrast, we propose competing hypotheses regarding how a Confucianism-based institutional environment affects vertical executive pay dispersion. With a sample of Chinese public firms, we find that both Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutional environments are negatively associated with a firm's vertical executive pay dispersion. Supplementary analyses show that the aforementioned main effects are attenuated when a firm is embedded by a communist party branch and has a younger CEO.

Affiliation with different religions can have different effects on practitioners’ trust in state institutions and in social actors. Based on a survey of 3,740 residents in Hong Kong in 2021, we examine the relationship between religious affiliation and believers’ trust in the political authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong and in civil actors in the city. We find that affiliation with traditional Chinese religions and Eastern religions has a positive and significant effect on believers’ trust in the political authorities, whereas belief in Western religions does not have such an effect. Affiliation with Western religions, however, has a stronger positive and significant effect on interpersonal trust and on tolerance for unconventional behaviour. These findings shed light on the interaction between the government and religious groups in Hong Kong after 1997.

In this paper, we examine the role played by religion in a struggle waged by Hui Muslim villagers against land expropriation. Religion can provide powerful resources for protest movements, especially for religious minorities, but it can also be dangerous. This is particularly true in China where the state has had little toleration of autonomous organization and has long been suspicious of religious organization, especially among ethnic minorities. Scholarly literature about collective action by religious minorities in China has focused on protests about cultural and political issues – and the repression of such protests – but there has been relatively little scholarship about protests by religious minorities over economic issues. The number of protests over economic conflicts has increased in recent years, and the state has been more tolerant of economic than of political protests. These conditions have shaped the following questions: what happens when villagers employ religious ideas and use religious organization to advance economic demands? How effective are religious ideas and organization as tools of mobilization? How do government authorities respond?