Past Session
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
16h

Measuring Religion from Behavior: Climate Shocks and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan

Abstract

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can shed light on the nature of religious adherence in Islamic societies. Exploiting random variation in climate, we find that as economic conditions in Afghanistan worsen, people become more religiously observant. The effects are most pronounced in areas where droughts have the biggest economic consequences, such as croplands without access to irrigation.

About this workshop

The Transport, Energy and Climate Economics workshop is an online seminar series in the fields of transport, energy and environmental economics.

The group provides a forum for exchange between researchers in these closely related sub-fields. The work is mainly in the field of economics, but contributions from related disciplines are regularly welcomed. The group allows both the presentation of very accomplished work and the discussion of research in progress, enabling authors to benefit from comments to refine their work.