CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 299Religion, Spirituality, and PsychologyReligion and Society InteractionsCulture, Economy, and Development Studies

Acts of God? Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts*

Open access
Sinding Bentzen, Jeanet·2019·The Economic Journal
DOI 10.1093/ej/uez008
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Religious beliefs potentially influence individual behaviour. But why are some societies more religious than others? One possible answer is religious coping: individuals turn to religion to deal with unbearable and unpredictable life events. To investigate whether coping can explain global differences in religiosity, I combine a global dataset on individual-level religiosity with spatial data on natural disasters. Individuals become more religious if an earthquake recently hit close by. Even though the effect decreases after a while, data on children of immigrants reveal a persistent effect across generations. The results point to religious coping as the main mediating channel, but alternative explanations such as mutual insurance or migration cannot be ruled out entirely. The findings may help explain why religiosity has not vanished as some scholars once predicted.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/ej/uez008

Cites

61 of 61 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • If the environmental constraints shifted to encourage more strict norm adherence again, then the new dominant form may reach fixation as deviance is again restricted to eliminate other cultural forms.

    “If the environmental constraints shifted to encourage more strict norm adherence again (as often happens after natural disasters or could be argued to have happened in the USA in the early 2000s-see: Bentzen 2019; Nail and McGregor 2009; Sibley and Bulbulia 2012), then the new dominant form may reach fixation as deviance is again restricted to eliminate other cultural forms.”

    From Cultural Evolution of Religion, Spirituality and Ritual: Impacts On Human Cooperation (2024) · cites this paper as Bentzen 2019

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 62 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Sinding Bentzen, J.
Affiliations
Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Venue
The Economic Journal
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2019-05-16
Volume
129
Issue
622
Pages
2295-2321
ISSN
  • 0013-0133 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-0297
DOI
10.1093/ej/uez008
OpenAlex
W3123988088
Cited by
299
References
62
Citations by year
2026: 30 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 59 · 2022: 42 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 30 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 3
FWCI
29.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • The Economic Journal (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Health › Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Religion and Society Interactions
  • Social Sciences › Demography › Culture, Economy, and Development Studies
Keywords
religiosity, natural disasters, religious coping, earthquakes, subnational variation, intergenerational transmission, immigrant children, mutual insurance, migration

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review