Religion, Labor Supply, and Happiness
SuperFreakonomics looked at research by Douglas Almond and Bhashkar Mazumder on the birth effects of prenatal exposure to Ramadan. A new paper by Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott looks at the economic effects of religious practices, a particularly relevant question this month:
We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: 1) longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and 2) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims.