Acerca de
PUBLICATIONS
Blue Collar Booms and American Mortality: Evidence From the Fracking Revolution (with Paul Shaloka). [pdf] Accepted: American Journal of Health Economics
Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings, and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. VoxDev
The Economic Journal [link]
Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism (with Daniel Hungerman). AEJ: Applied Economics [link]
Media: Le Monde, Notre Dame News
WORKING PAPERS
Social Norm Salience and Fertility: Evidence from Papal Visits (with Lakshmi Iyer and Paloma Moyano). [link]
Media: Notre Dame News; Crux
How do social norms affect fertility? We examine the impact of Pope John Paul II’s visits to 13 Latin American countries, which reinforced the salience of existing Catholic norms. We find positive long-term effects on fertility. These are driven by first births and by those residing in a region that the Pope visited. Papal messaging matters: fertility increases more when the Pope mentions marriage, abortion or contraception and decreases with condemnations of pre-marital sex. Marriages increase with all three messages. The fertility effect is stronger for wealthier and more educated women, whose behavior is further from the Catholic social norm.
Within the Calculus of Conscious Choice: Industrialization, Religion, and Fertility Decline in Early 1800s France [link]
I examine whether the economic incentives generated by the First Industrial Revolution contributed to fertility decline, and how their effects depended on prevailing social norms. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of steam engines and mechanized cotton spinning across French departments, I find that early industrialization reduced marital fertility, but only in less religious regions. These results suggest that economic incentives associated with early industrialization mattered for fertility behavior, but that their effects were conditional on the prevailing social context. More broadly, the findings show the importance of considering interactions between economic incentives and cultural constraints in shaping the fertility transition.
A Pentecostal Ethic? Economic Outcomes from a Randomized Religious Intervention (With David Murphy, Samuel Bird, and Susan Kilonzo). [AEA RCT Registry]
We study how religion influences economic behavior using a randomized control trial in Kisumu, Kenya. Participants were randomly assigned invitations to workshops hosted by either Pentecostal or mainline Christian churches, followed by surveys and incentive-compatible choice experiments to measure altruism and investment behavior. Pooling both treatments, we find that treatment assignment led to decreased self-reported self control and grit while reducing contributions to a communal entrepreneurship fund by 16.3% relative to the control. Examining denominational differences, we find evidence that a shifting landscape toward Pentecostalism matters: Pentecostal messaging appears to have both decreased the amount of financial transfers received from family/friends and given by the respondent and further increased interest bearing savings among men and intrinsic religiosity among women. These findings provide causal evidence that Christian religious participation promotes individualism at the expense of collectivism, while demonstrating that sub-Saharan Africa's changing denominational composition may further amplify such effects with economically meaningful implications for investment behavior.