Paul Seabright | Published Journal Articles

Research on the economics of religion

In the last few years I have been involved in a range of research on the economics of religion with several co-authors, including Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati, Julie Lassébie, Pepita Miquel-Florensa, Amma Panin and Eva Raiber.

In May 2024 Princeton University Press published my book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People. More details here.

I took part in the IAST podcast Crossing Channels on the subject “What Is the Future of Religion?”, released in May 2023.

Here are the publications to date from these projects:

Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti (with Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati and Pepita Miquel-Florensa), World Development 144 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105441

US Churches’ Responses to Covid-19: results from Facebook (with Eva Raiber), pre-print in CovidEconomics, issue 61.

Trust in the image of God: Links between religiosity and reciprocity in Haiti (with Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati and Pepita Miquel-Florensa), Economics of Transition and Institutional Change (2020), https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.12263

“God insures those who pay? Formal insurance and religious offerings in Ghana” (with Emmanuelle Auriol, Julie Lassébie, Amma Panin and Eva Raiber), Quarterly Journal of Economics 135(4), (2020), pp. 1799-1848, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa015.

“On the Origins of Enchantment: not such a puzzle”, Religion, Brain and Behavior 10(3), (2020), pp. 345-357, https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2019.1678517.

“Religion and Entrepreneurship: A Match Made in Heaven?”, Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 175 (2016), pp. 201-219.

Here are working papers:

“Alcohol, Behavioral Norms and Sexual Violence on US College Campuses”, CEPR discussion paper number 17147.

I also have an op-ed piece in Project Syndicate related to these themes: “Is Christianity Losing to Islam?”, 1st June 2019, available here.

Publication: What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China

This paper, with Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren, Jeanne Bovet and Charlotte Wang, is published in Economic Development and Cultural Change 71(3), 2023, https://doi.org/10.1086/717903.

Pre-publication version here.

Abstract:

In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, integrating this with decisions about premarital investment such as education. Do spousal preferences of parents and children conflict? We estimate parents’ spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles, elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. We simulate marriage outcomes based on preferences for age and education and compare them with patterns in the general population, and with preferences of a survey of students. The common concern that there may be aversion to highly-educated or high-earning wives is somewhat corroborated in parents’ preferences but not in students’ preferences, nor in outcomes, where homogamy is common and wives who are more educated than husbands are as common as husbands more educated than wives. Parents prefer wives younger than their husbands, yet most couples are the same age, an outcome consistent with student preferences. Overall, divergences between parental and child preferences exist, but are neither major nor very influential in explaining observed outcomes. Fears that highly educated women face diminished marriage prospects appear less serious than often claimed.

Publication: “The old boy network: are the professional networks of female executives less effective than men’s for advancing their careers?”

This paper, joint with Marie Lalanne, has now been published in The Journal of Institutional Economics, and you can find the link here. It’s worth noting that the paper has been significantly revised since earlier circulated versions, and in particular contains new results on homophily (both men and women derive more benefit from same-gender connections, and men have more of these than women do). Please cite only this version and not the earlier versions.

Abstract

We investigate the impact of professional networks on men’s and women’s earnings, using a dataset of European and North American executives. The size of an individual’s network of influential former colleagues has a large positive association with remuneration, with an elasticity of around 21%. However, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using various fixed effects as well as a placebo technique, we find that the real causal impact of networks is barely positive for men and significantly lower for women. We provide suggestive evidence indicating that the apparent discrimination against women is due to two factors: first, both men and women are helped more by own-gender than other-gender connections, and men have more of these than women do. Second, a subset of employers we identify as ‘female friendly firms’ recruit more women but reward networks less than other firms.

Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti

This paper, which is joint with Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati and Pepita Miguel-Florensa, is now published in World Development. You can download the paper here.

New publication: Gender Differences in Social Interactions

This paper, which is joint with Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Bernard Richter and Peter Schwardmann, has been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2021). You can download it here.

An earlier paper with Guido Friebel, entitled “Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies” and published in the Journal of Economic Psychology in 2011, is available here.

New publication: Favoring your in-group can harm both them and you: ethnicity and public goods provision in China

This paper, which is joint with César Mantilla, Ling Zhou, Charlotte Wang, Donghui Yang and Suping Shen, is published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 185 (2021) 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.02.016. You can download it here.

Migration and the equilibrium prevalence of infectious diseases

Here are some press articles and blog posts I have written on Covid-19:

Easing lockdown: digital applications can help

God insures those who pay? Formal insurance and religious offerings in Ghana.

This paper, which is joint with Emmanuelle Auriol, Julie Lassébie, Amma Panin and Eva Raiber, is now published at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It’s available on open access here:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/4/1799/5861944

We started this project back in 2015.

Here are some pictures of very colorful Ghanaian coffins: