Measuring Religion from Behavior: Climate Shocks and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan / Oeindrila Dube, Joshua Blumenstock, Michael Callen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dube, Oeindrila.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Blumenstock, Joshua.

Callen, Michael.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30694.

NBER working paper series no. w30694

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can shed light on the nature of religious adherence in Islamic societies. Exploiting random variation in climate, we find that as economic conditions in Afghanistan worsen, people become more religiously observant. The effects are most pronounced in areas where droughts have the biggest economic consequences, such as croplands without access to irrigation.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2022.