Within the field of economics, despite being widespread, African traditional religions tend to be perceived as unimportant and ignored when studying economic decision-making. This study tests whether this presumption is correct. Using daily data on business decisions and performance of beer...

Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...

We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes ("SNFs") which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients...

We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of...

In recent decades, death rates from poisonings, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease have dramatically increased in the United States. We show that these "deaths of despair" began to increase relative to trend in the early 1990s, that this increase was preceded by a decline in religious...

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...

We study the climate as a determinant of religious belief. People believe in the divine when religious authorities (the "church") can credibly intervene in nature on their behalf. We present a model in which nature sets the pattern of rainfall over time and the church chooses when optimally to...

In a rational-choice approach to religious conversion, the conversion rate depends on a person's costs of switching religions and costs of having one's religion deviate from the type viewed as ideal. The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) waves for 1991, 1998, 2008, and 2018 allow for...

In 1996, following an epidemic, Pfizer tested a new drug on 200 children in Muslim Nigeria. 11 children died while others were disabled. We study the effects of the disclosure, in 2000, of the deaths of Muslim children in the Pfizer trials on vaccine compliance among Muslim mothers. Muslim...

Religious worship is integral to the lives of millions of Americans. In this paper, I provide a descriptive analysis of religious worship attendance using geodata from smartphones for over 2 million Americans in 2019. I establish several key findings. First, 73% of people step into a religious...