Jeanet Sinding Bentzen

Welcome to my website! I am Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, where I am also head of the PhD program. I am Associate Editor at The Economic Journal and Executive Director of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture. 

Ultimately, I am interested in why the people in some countries fare better economically than others. There are immediate causes for this, but there are also deeper causes. I strive to find the deeper causes. This quest has brought me to focus on religion and its’ causes and consequences for society. Religion obviously influences our internal values and beliefs, but also the institutions that surround us. My research is mainly empirical and I use datasets spanning thousands or millions of individuals or companies in multiple different societies across the globe. My general research interests are religion, political economy, cultural values, economic growth, and institutions.

I focus on religiosity, meaning the degree of religious beliefs, independently of the God(s) a person believes in. The idea is that people or societies are more similar in terms of their religiosity than in terms of their particular religious beliefs. For instance, along certain dimensions, a highly devout Protestant may have more in common with a highly devout Muslim than he or she does with a less religious Protestant. Also, the drivers of differences in religiosity seem quite similar across different religions. For instance, religiosity rises after disasters, such as earthquakes and COVID19, in all the major religions. One challenge is measuring the intensity of religious beliefs. I am currently conducting research showing that peoples’ first names reflect the religiosity of their parents. We can use these novel measures to examine how differences in religiosity matter for various outcomes, such as science, crime, and risk-taking.

I am also CEPR Research Affiliate in Economic History and the Macroeconomics and Growth Programme, GLO Research Affiliate, External Research Associate at CAGE, Warwick University, and Research Affiliate at the SoDa Labs, Monash University.