NOVAFRICA Seminar: Daniel Bennett, University Southern California – Religion, Prayer and Health Production

In our upcoming NOVAFRICA Research Seminar, we are pleased to welcome Professor Daniel Bennett, from University Southern California, on Wednesday, 07th October, at 11:00 AM (Lisbon time), in Room D004, at the Nova School of Business and Economics, Carcavelos campus. Who will present his paper:

“Religion, Prayer and Health Production”

Abstract

Economic models typically treat health production technologies as objective and commonly understood. In practice, people may act on subjective perceptions of these technologies shaped by cultural and religious beliefs. We study whether prayer responds to changes in objective disease risk in a manner consistent with economic optimization. During the COVID-19 pandemic, most US adults believed that prayer was effective against COVID-19 and prayed in order to keep themselves safe. We incorporate prayer into a simple health production framework and exploit staggered vaccine eligibility as a source of variation in the effective price of protection. Vaccine eligibility reduces prayer as well as avoidance (the use of masks and social distancing), indicating substitution across perceived health inputs. Consistent with inframarginality, strongly religious people show no response while weakly religious people reduce prayer by 27 percent. These findings suggest that religious practices respond to objective risk in ways that mirror standard economic substitution.

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