Human Capital and the Supply of Religion

Joseph Engelberg, Raymond Fisman, Jay C. Hartzell and Christopher A. Parsons
Additional contact information
Jay C. Hartzell: University of Texas, Austin
Christopher A. Parsons: University of California at San Diego

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 3, 415-427

Abstract: We study the role of labor inputs in religious attendance using data on Oklahoma Methodist congregations from 1961 to 2003. Pastors play a significant role in church growth: replacing a 25th percentile pastor with a 75th percentile one increases annual attendance growth by 3%. A pastor’s performance in his or her first church (largely the result of random assignment) predicts future performance, suggesting a causal effect of pastors on growth. The deployment of pastors by the church indicates efficient use of labor: low-performing pastors are more likely to be rotated or exit the sample, and high-performing pastors are moved to larger congregations.

JEL-codes: J24 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00582 (application/pdf)

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:tpr:restat:v:98:y:2016:i:3:p:415-427

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press (mitp-repec@mit.edu).