War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery
Wladislaw Mill,
Tobias Ebert,
Jana Berkessel,
Thorsteinn Jonsson,
Sune Lehmann and
Jochen Gebauer
No 9se4r, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Abstract:
Does war make people more religious? Answers to this classic question are dominated by the lack of causality. We exploit the Vietnam Draft Lottery -- a natural experiment that drafted male U.S. citizens into military service during the Vietnam War -- to conclusively show that war increases religiosity. We measure religiosity via religious imagery on web-scraped photographs of hundreds of thousands of gravestones of deceased U.S. Americans using a tailor-made convolutional neural network. Our analysis provides compelling and robust evidence that war indeed increases religiosity: people who were randomly drafted into war are at least 20 % more likely to have religious gravestones. This effect sets in almost immediately, persists even after 50 years, and generalizes across space and societal strata.
Date: 2024-04-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-hea, nep-his and nep-sea
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Working Paper: War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lottery (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:9se4r
DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9se4r
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