Progress in the Economics of Religion

Abstract

The past few decades have witnessed dramatic growth in the domain of economics. Once limited largely to the study of commerce, economists now routinely analyze such diverse subjects as health, crime, education, fertility, discrimination, voting, marriage, and addiction. A number of researchers are working to add religion to this list. Armed with the tools of economic theory and a growing body of data, they are exploring the determinants of religious behavior, the nature of religious institutions, and the social and economic impact of religion. Viewing religious behavior as an instance of rational choice rather than an exception to it, their work parallels other attempts to expand the domain of economics. Hence, the research is quite unlike Islamic economics, Christian economics, or any other faith-based approach to economic theory and policy. To date, the economics of religion has had its greatest impact in sociology, since it directly addresses concerns central to the sociology of religion. Sociologists have thus begun speaking of market models and rational choice theory as the for religious research (Warner [1993], Young [1995]). This new paradigm explains and integrates a wealth of existing data, generates new predictions that suggest new avenues for empirical research, and yields policy implications about the welfare effects of government intervention in the religious marketplace. Since most work in the economics of religion is new and scattered over a variety of journals, a brief overview would seem to be in order. An overview serves also to dispel the popular but increasingly untenable view of religion as a fading vestige of pre-scientific times.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.