Research

The question of whether religious activities decline with economic development has been actively debated in sociology and economics for centuries. We address this question exploiting house price fluctuations in the U.S. in the early 2000s. We show that an increase in local house prices is associated with a decline in time spent on religious activities for homeowners relative to renters. This effect is not present for volunteering and civic activities. The main result is driven by a wealth effect, whereby activities that have an inferior-good component decline with housing wealth, and by a substitution effect whereby the attractiveness of activities linked to the residential asset increases during housing booms.

We study the mental health of graduate students and faculty at 14 Economics departments in Europe. Using clinically validated surveys sent out in the fall of 2021, we find that 34.7% of graduate students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression or anxiety and 17.3% report suicidal or selfharm ideation in a two-week period. 15.8% of faculty members experience moderate to severe depression or anxiety symptoms, with prevalence higher among nontenure track (42.9%) and tenure track (31.4%) faculty than tenured (9.6%) faculty. We estimate that the COVID-19 pandemic accounts for about 74% of the higher prevalence of depression symptoms and 30% of the higher prevalence of anxiety symptoms in our European sample relative to a 2017 U.S. sample of economics graduate students. We also document issues in the work environment, including a high incidence of sexual harassment.

Throughout the world, cities are drivers of economic growth. They are hubs of innovation, entrepreneurship, and social change. Yet, the mechanisms through which the economic benefits of cities occur remain poorly understood because many social and economic forces change in tandem with urbanization. We study the randomized rollout of a program promoting urban access in rural villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Implemented by a local NGO, this “City Access Program” provides regular weekly transportation by motorbike taxi to the city of Kananga to individuals from rural villages. Our project seeks to provide causal evidence on the impacts of access to cities on economic behavior and wellbeing, gender norms, moral values such as preference for the in-group over the out-group, and psychological traits such as grit, self-control, and self-efficacy. The data collection is complete.

We further seek to provide causal evidence on how markets shape values using the same program. We exploit exogenous variation in the participants’ access to markets, the total numbers of customers, and the number of repeated customers induced by the randomization to different market types. First, we empirically assess whether markets are value laden. Second, we test three classic hypotheses about markets in social sciences: (1) markets make humans more trusting, more trustworthy, and more likely to view social interaction as a positive-sum game (the doux-commerce thesis); (2) markets turn humans into self-interested utility maximizers who become more detached from their communities; (3) markets make humans feel poorer by raising the standards of material wealth that is perceived to be necessary for happiness (the Rousseau hypothesis).

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, churches play pivotal roles as social, economic, and political centers in vibrant free religious markets, in which indigenous beliefs and Christian beliefs are practiced in syncretism. Churches offer educational, insurance, and welfare services, and serve as platforms for political discourse, profoundly influencing individuals’ values and aspirations. This project aims to enhance our understanding of the role of churches for economic development by providing descriptive evidence on the religious landscape in Kananga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For this end, we conducted a comprehensive church census, representative surveys of pastors and congregants, and textual analyses of church service recordings.