davidbau.com

Is Moderation a Blip?

Where have the religious moderates gone?

Perhaps religious moderation is a temporary blip, a quirk of history....

Sudden-Onset Slothfulness

When I blog infrequently, some of my friends ask, "are you super-busy with work?"

Sometimes the answer is "yes," but in the last few weeks, despite having plenty that needs to be done at work, the answer has been "no...."

Economics of Religion

There has not been that much systematic study about the economics of religion. But there has been some. Here are the working papers from a couple researchers whose work I found interesting:

Robert Barro (Harvard) is pursuing a number of avenues of research on economics and religion and is coauthor of "Religion and Economic Growth," a paper which notes that economic growth is positively correlated with belief in Heaven and Hell (Hell more strongly) and negatively correlated with religious observance (going to church regularly).

Barro's working papers are available here.

Larry Iannaccone (George Mason) runs the Center for Economic Study of Religion, and is a strong advocate of more aggressively mining existing data for information about the economic impact and behavior of religion. By asking people of various ages about church-going habits from their childhood, he has built very interesting time-series data on historical religious observance in dozens of countries around the world.

A number of working papers by Iannacocone and others are available here.