Journal Articles
2026 forthcoming. Economic Shocks and Religious Conflict in Medieval India (with Rohit Ticku and Anand Shrivastava). CEPR Discussion Paper DP17986. Forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History.
2025. Do Religious People Cope Better in a Crisis? Evidence from the Pandemic Lockdowns in the United Kingdom (with Shaun Larcom, Jaimin Shah and Po Wen Shi), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Volume 237, September. Column about this paper on VoxEU, 16 April 2024.
2023. Religion, Covid-19 and Mental Health (with G. Bahal, K. Shastry and A. Shrivastava), European Economic Review, Volume160, November.
2022. 'Religion and Discrimination: A Review Essay of Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom'. Journal of Economic Literature, March, Volume 60, Number 1: 256-278.
2021. 'A Simulation Study of How Religious Fundamentalism Takes Root' (with J. Fan, D. Friedman, J. Gair, B. Redlicki and C. Velu), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 192, December: 465-481.
2021. 'Learning from Near-Misses from Covid-19' (with C. Velu). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PNAS October 5, 2021 118 (40) e2108269118.
2020. 'Social Interactions, Ethnicity, Religion and Fertility in Kenya' (with M. Weeks), Journal of Demographic Economics, September, 86(3): 329-365.
2020. 'Culture and Colonial Legacy: Evidence from Public Goods Games' (with L. Chaudhary, J. Rubin and A. Shrivastava), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 173, May: 107-129.
2019.'Religion and Depression in Adolescence' (with J. Fruehwirth and A. Zhang), Journal of Political Economy, June, 127(3): 1178-1209.
2018. 'Religious Riots and Electoral Politics in India' (with A. Shrivastava), Journal of Development Economics, 131, March, pp. 104-122.
2016. 'The New Economics of Religion' Journal of Economic Literature, 54: 2, June, pp. 395-441 (lead article).
2014. ‘Communication and Marketing of Services by Religious Organizations in India’ (with C. Velu and A. Mumit) Journal of Business Research, 67, pp. 59-67.
2013. ‘Missing Women and India’s Religious Demography’ (with S. Joshi) Journal of South Asian Development 8(3), pp. 301-331.
2013. ‘Missing Women in the United Kingdom’ (with A. Adamou and C. Drakos) IZA Journal of Migration Volume 10, Issue 2.
2013. ‘The Economics of Consanguineous Marriages’ (with S. Joshi and Q. Do) Review of Economics and Statistics, July, 95(3), pp.904-918.
2012. ‘Dominance and Innovation: A Returns-Based Beliefs Approach’ (with C. Velu and J. Gair), Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, Volume 28, Issue 3, 264–281, May/June.
2007. ‘The Effectiveness of Jobs Reservation: Caste, Religion and Economic Status in India’ (with V. K. Borooah and A. Dubey), Development and Change, Volume 38, Number 3, May, pp. 423-445.
2006. ‘Real Options and Demographic Decisions’ (with C. Velu), Journal of Development Economics, Volume 80, Number1, June, pp. 39-58.
2005. ‘The Decomposition of Inter-Group Differences in a Logit Model: Extending the Oaxaca-Blinder Approach with an Application to School Enrolment in India’ (with V. Borooah), Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, Volume 30, Number 4, pp. 279-293.
2005. ‘Vidya, Veda and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India’ (with V. Borooah), Journal of Development Studies, Volume 81, Number 4, November, pp.1369-1404.
2005. ‘Social Capital, Economic Growth, and Regional Development’ (with M. Kitson and B. Toh), Regional Studies, Volume 39, Number 8, November, pp. 1015-1040.
2005. ‘Religion, Literacy, and the Female-to-Male Ratio in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 40, Number 5, pp. 419-427.
2004. 'The Risk of Child and Adolescent Mortality among Vulnerable Populations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil', (with M. Monteiro), Journal of Biosocial Science, pp.1- 24.
2003. ‘Religion, Reproduction and Development in Contemporary India’, Development, Volume 46, Number 4, December.
2002. ‘Religion and the Decision to use Contraception in India’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 4, Number 1, pp. 711-722.
Chapters in Handbooks and Edited Volumes
2026. Religion, Population and the Environment (with K. Iljina and K. Shastry) in V. Maltsev and N. Singh (eds) Economics, Religion and Public Policy. Springer Nature Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2450, 2024.
2025. The Economics of Religious Conflicts in C. Bagnoli and V. Pacillo (eds) Religious Conflict: Analysis and Modes of Resolution. London: Routledge. Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2521, 2025
2024., 'Religion and Employment in India' (with G. Bahal, U. Chandra and A. Shrivastava) In: Studies in Religion and the Everyday. Edited by: Farhana Ibrahim, Oxford University Press.
2022. ‘Religion and Mental Health’ (with G. Rosso) in Springer Nature Handbook on Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Edited by Professor Klaus F. Zimmermann.
2020. 'The Economics of Religion in Developing Countries' in Religion and Human Flourishing, edited by Adam Cohen, Baylor University Press.
2019. 'Religion and Demography' in Advances in the Economics of Religion, edited by J-P Carvalho, S. Iyer and J. Rubin. International Economic Association Series, Volume 158, Palgrave Macmillan.
2019. 'Introduction' (with J-P. Carvalho and J. Rubin) in Advances in the Economics of Religion, edited by J-P Carvalho, S. Iyer and J. Rubin. International Economic Association Series, Volume 158, Palgrave Macmillan.
2018. 'Religion and Institutions' in A Research Agenda for New Institutional Economics, edited by Claude Menard and Mary S. Shirley. Edward Elgar Publishing.
2013. ‘Why Marry a Cousin? Insights from Bangladesh’ (with S. Joshi and Q. Do). In Marrying in South Asia, edited by Ravinder Kaur and Rajni Parliwala, Orient Black Swan, pp. 208-233.
2009. ‘Gender, Religion and the Age at Marriage in India'. In M. Pal, P. Bharati, B. Ghosh and T. S. Vasulu eds. Gender and Discrimination: Health, Nutritional Status and Role of Women in India, Oxford University Press.
2008. ‘Religion and Economic Development’ In Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume eds., The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Second Edition, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2006. ‘Human Capital’. In David A. Clark ed. The Elgar Companion to Development Studies. North-Holland.
Working Papers and Current Projects
A City of God: Afterlife Beliefs and Job Support in Brazil (with Tiago Cavalcanti, Christopher Rauh, Christian Roerig and Maryam Vaziri), Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2268, 2024. Also available as CEPR Discussion Paper DP17719.
Can Artificial Intelligence Formulate Strategy? The Opportunities and Challenges of Computability (with Chander Velu and Jonathan Gair), June 2025.
Probabilistic Choice Models (with Jonathan Gair and Chander Velu), January 2025.
China India Revisited (with Wei Xiong, Dmitrii Petrukhin and Xu Yang)
Gatherings and Epidemics (with Girish Bahal, Anand Shrivastava and Kishen Shastry)
Religiosity and Recessions (with Srinivasan Murali, Anand Kumar and Monishankar Bishnu)
Religiosity and Gender Equality (with Eve Colson-Sihra and Xuezhou Wu)
The Economics of Religious Riots in India (with Dmitrii Petrukhin and Anand Shrivastava)
Evaluating Economic, Religious and Environmental Message Framing on Climate Spending in India using Large Language Models (with Ramit Debnath, Indraneel Dasgupta and Gauri Chandra)
Other Writing
'Holy Wars? Temple Desecrations in Medieval India', IDEAS FOR INDIA, 27 March 2017.
'Temples and Economists', THE WHEEL publication, St. Catharine's College, June 2015.
'Faith, Fertility and the Field Economist', The British Academy Review, Number 7, pp. 33-35, 2003.
Journal Editorial Boards
PLOS ONE
Journal of Comparative Economics
Journal of Religion and Demography
Journal of Economics, Management and Religion
JEMAR Special Issue on Social Identities and Economic Outcomes Call for Papers Deadline 31 December 2025
