RT Journal Article
SR 00
ID 10.1093/qje/qjaa015
A1 Auriol, Emmanuelle
A1 Lassébie, Julie
A1 Panin, Amma
A1 Raiber, Eva
A1 Seabright, Paul
T1 God insures those who pay? Formal insurance and religious offerings in Ghana
JF The Quarterly Journal of Economics
YR 2020
FD 2020-11
VO vol. 135
IS n° 4
SP 1799
OP 1848
K1 economics of religion
K1 informal insurance
K1 charitable giving
AB This paper provides experimental support for the hypothesis that insurance can be a motive for religious donations. We randomize enrollment of members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana into a commercial funeral insurance policy. Then church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes. Members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own church compared to members that only receive information about the insurance. Enrollment also reduces giving towards other spiritual goods. We set up a model exploring different channels of religiously based insurance. The implications of the model and the results from the dictator games suggest that adherents perceive the church as a source of insurance and that this insurance is derived from beliefs in an interventionist God. Survey results suggest that material insurance from the church community is also important and we hypothesize that these two insurance channels exist in parallel.
PB Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
SN 0033-5533
LK https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/34907/
UL https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/by/auriol/ghana_religion_final.pdf