The Effect of Religious Constraints on Individual Labor Supply

Guillermo Cabanillas-Jiménez ()
Additional contact information
Guillermo Cabanillas-Jiménez: Universidad de Alcalá (UAH)

The European Journal of Development Research, 2024, vol. 36, issue 6, No 3, 1398-1447

Abstract: Abstract We study the effect of religious constraints on individual’s labor supply decisions in the context of Ramadan, one of the central pillars of Islam, consisting of an entire lunar month of fasting from sunrise to sunset. Using household panel data from Malawi for the years 2010, 2013, and 2016, we find that females reallocate their time, from their jobs to household work. For males, we do not find such reallocation of hours, as they increase both, their hours worked at their jobs but also in the household. As a robustness check to our results, we use household data from Bangladesh to support the estimates on the extensive margins, where we do not find any effect on labor force both for females and males or the likelihood of working during Ramadan. These findings show that we need to go beyond general beliefs that labor supply goes down, but individuals keep working at home or more hours overall, when religious constrains appear.

Keywords: Labor supply; Ramadan; Hours worked; Wooldridge correction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C01 C23 C26 C93 J22 J43 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41287-024-00643-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:eurjdr:v:36:y:2024:i:6:d:10.1057_s41287-024-00643-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41287/PS2

DOI: 10.1057/s41287-024-00643-y

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Development Research is currently edited by Spencer Henson and Natalia Lorenzoni

More articles in The European Journal of Development Research from Palgrave Macmillan, European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().