Date:
Location:
Oeindrila Dube (University of Chicago), "Measuring Religion from Behavior: Climate Shocks and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan"
Abstract
Religious adherence has been hard to study because it is hard to measure: self-reported data is both infrequent and incomplete. We use anonymized “digital trace” cell phone data to create a novel measure of religious adherence in Afghanistan. The resulting measurements are highly granular in time and space. We illustrate the power of this data by looking at the effect of economic shocks. Rising temperatures in Afghanistan are increasing the severity and frequency of droughts. Using quasi-random changes to climate, we find that our measure of adherence is sensitive to these droughts: as economic conditions worsen, people become more and more religiously observant. The effects are most pronounced in areas where droughts have the biggest economic consequences, such as croplands without access to irrigation.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alesina Seminar on Political Economy (PE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.