In the last decade or two, the economics of religion has become a full-fledged subfield in economics. Economists (and social scientists of all stripes) who study religion are interested in the many ways religion affects decision-making via politics, education, persecution, technology diffusion, violence, and much more. One subject that has long been affected by religion is demography. How many children a family has, how people view contraception, the urban/rural divide, where they migrate to, and so on is often intimately tied to religion. Social scientists have long known this. But only in recent years have data availability and econometric techniques caught up with the theory. We can now test the many hypotheses connecting religion to all sorts of demographic and social scientific phenomena, while also allowing the data to guide us to new theories. As a result, the literature has blossomed in the last few years.

A couple years ago I was approached by the editors of Journal of Demographic Economics, David de la Croix and Murat Iyigun, about editing a special issue on the economics of religion. The goal was supposed to be to capture various aspects of this exciting new literature by publishing research focused on the intersections of social science, demography, and religion. I believe that the issue, which was published in September 2020, succeeded in doing so. It contained seven fascinating articles by many of the top scholars in the field. I summarized these articles in the introduction to the issue. Here, I will give a brief flavor of what the issue contained.

Julia Cagé and Valeria Rueda’s “Sex and the Mission: The Conflicting Effects of Early Christian investments on sub-Saharan Africa’s HIV Epidemic” addresses an incredibly important issue: what is responsible for the spread and persistence of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa? Cagé and Rueda look at the important historical legacy of religious missionaries. They hypothesize—and find evidence supporting—that missionaries may have had two counter-vailing effects that are still with us in the 21^st century. On the one hand, they promoted the spread of religious norms that discouraged safe sex. On the other hand, they built health clinics and the corresponding institutional infrastructure persisted.

Two related papers are Sascha O. Becker and Francesco Cinnirella’s “Prussia Disaggregated: The Demography of its Universe of Localities in 1871” and Ran Abramitzky and Hanna Halaburda’s “Were Jews in Interwar Poland More Educated?” One finding common to both is that the relationship between religion and education can switch depending on the urban-rural divide of adherents. Abramitzky and Halaburda find that urban Polish Jews are (slightly) less literate than urban Christians and rural Jews were less literate than rural Christians, but Jews as a whole were more literate than Christians. The reason is that Jews were so much more urban and urbanites had much higher literacy rates. Becker and Cinnirella find similar results in 19^th century Prussia.

Lisa Blaydes and Melina Platas’s fascinating paper, “Religion, Family Structure, and the Perpetuation of Female Genital Cutting in Egypt,” explores the role religious leaders have played in slowing the spread of female genital cutting in Egypt. Comparing Muslims and (Christian) Copts, they find that anti-FGC attitudes tended to become more common over time in both communities, but the rate of decline was much sharper among Copts. Blaydes and Platas find that attitudes of religious leaders help explain these differences.

Sriya Iyer and Melvyn Weeks present a new theory, support by a data analysis, for how to think about fertility and religion/ethnicity in “Social Interactions, Ethnicity, Religion and Fertility in Kenya.” Their theory provides convincing insight into how ethnic spillovers swamp out religious and many other effects when it comes to fertility decisions. Eli Berman and Zaur Rzakhanov present another paper at the intersection of fertility and religion in “Fertility, Migration, and Altruism.” Their paper attempts to provide an explanation for why early Jewish migrants to Israel had much higher fertility rates than post-Soviet immigrants. Berman and Rzakhanov find that nearly all of the differences between the two cohorts can be explained by selection (i.e., the two cohorts were different to begin with).

Choon Wang’s “Religious Prohibition and Sacrifice: Evidence from the Amish Restriction on High School Education” harkens back to the canonical models in the economics of religion. Wang asks why the Amish have major restrictions on secondary education, and whether these restrictions serve the welfare-enhancing purpose often found in religious groups. He tests a theory which argues that education restrictions can be welfare-enhancing by inducing those with the highest shadow price of religious investment (i.e., those with profitable outside opportunities) to leave the group.

These are all wonderful papers. It is an honor to have them in the special issue, and I hope they are only the beginning of what should be important research progammes. For better or for worse, religion plays an enormous role in demographic decisions across the world. We are slowly getting a better understanding of what that means for all types of economic, social, and political outcomes.

Cover photo by James Coleman on Unsplash