4.02.2015

Disasters and religiosity

Jeanet Sinding Bentzen has a new version of her working paper on disasters (mostly earthquakes) and religiosity:
Acts of God: Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts
Religiosity affects everything from fertility and labor force participation to health. But why are some societies more religious than others? To answer this question, I test the religious coping theory, which states that many individuals draw on their religious beliefs to understand and deal with adverse life events. Combining subnational district level data on values across the globe from the World Values Survey with spatial data on natural disasters, I find that individuals are more religious when their district was hit recently by an earthquake. And further, that individuals are more religious when living in areas with higher long term earthquake risk. Using data on children of immigrants in Europe, I document that this is mainly due to a long-term effect: high religiosity levels evolving in high earthquake risk areas, is passed on through generations to individuals no longer living in high earthquake risk areas. The impact is global: earthquakes increase religiosity both within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, and within all continents. Last, I document that the results are consistent with the literature on religious coping and inconsistent with alternative theories of insurance or selection.
Selected quote:
"The estimates indicate that increasing earthquake risk by 30 percentiles from the median increases religiosity by 9 percentiles. The tendency is global: Christians, Muslims, and Hindus all exhibit higher religiosity in response to elevated earthquake risk, and so do inhabitants of every continent."
 via Amir.

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