Determining the Impact of Religion on the Gender Gap and Conflict Using Natural Experiments

With this project Jeanet Bentzen tests the hypothesis that religion impacts peoples decisions to an extent that is detectable at societal level. Jeanet explains:

“We focus on the degree of religious beliefs within religious denominations instead of differences across religious denominations. In this project, I explore religious economics with Sascha Becker, a professor at Monash University. For eight months at Monash, we will empirically analyze German cities in the period 1200-1700.

Sascha Becker is a leader researcher in the field and she has access to unique data for the German cities during the long historical period. We will estimate the impact of religiosity on the gender gap and conflict, which has not been done before. Current religiosity can be measured with surveys, whereas historic religiosity demands more creative measures, such as number of churches and religious names.

To identify the causal impact, we cannot use laboratory experiments, as our subjects are societies and religion cannot be randomized. Instead, we will use natural experiments - such as earthquakes - that exogenously distribute high religiosity to some societies and low to others. We will link this exogenous variation in religiosity to data on the gender gap and conflict occurrence."

Introducing religion into macroeconomics is new and might lead to a leap forward in our understanding of socio-economic differences across the globe.