Research

Job Market Paper: Religious Revivals and the Rise of Cultural Politics

How does exposure to religious revivals affect political behavior and partisan ideology? To what extent does exposure to these cultural events drive differences and divergences between political identities? To investigate these questions, I examine the cultural and political impacts of religious revivals held by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) across the United States. Using a differences-in-differences design with staggered adoption, I find that exposure to Graham's revivals had little to no significant immediate or persistent effect on voter turnout or Republican vote share. Instead, revivals increased the partisan intensity of elected officials in both a leftward and rightward direction.

Equal Under God: Cultural Similarity Across Religions
Joint with Ömer Özak

This paper explores whether there are persistent cultural differences across individuals of different religious denominations. Specifically, using data on more than 200,000 individuals in over 100 countries, we explore the relationship between cultural values and individuals' religious beliefs. We document that individuals' religious affiliation generally does not have an economically significant relationship with their cultural values. This result is especially strong for cultural values associated in the literature with economic development, democracy, or gender attitudes. Moreover, we find that cultural diversity within religions trumps cultural diversity across religions. Contrary to the strong-held belief among social scientists that individuals from different religious denominations have different cultural values, our results suggest that cultural differences across the world do not seem to be driven by religion.

In Progress:

Competition in Religious Markets: Evidence from American Evangelicalism