Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lottery
Author-Name: Wladislaw Mill
Author-Email: mill@uni-mannheim.de
Author-Name: Tobias Ebert
Author-Name: Jana B. Berkessel
Author-Name: Thorsteinn Jonsson
Author-Name: Sune Lehmann
Author-Name: Jochen E. Gebauer

Classification-JEL: Z12, N30, N40, P00
Keywords: War, Religion, Vietnam Draft Lottery, Grave

Abstract: Does war make people more religious? Answers to this classic question are dominated by the lack of causality. We exploit the Vietnam Draft Lottery -- a natural experiment that drafted
male U.S. citizens into military service during the Vietnam War -- to conclusively show that war increases religiosity. We measure religiosity via religious imagery on web-scraped
photographs of hundreds of thousands of gravestones of deceased U.S. Americans using a tailor-made convolutional neural network. Our analysis provides compelling and robust
evidence that war indeed increases religiosity: people who were randomly drafted into war are at least 20% more likely to have religious gravestones. This effect sets in almost
immediately, persists even after 50 years, and generalizes across space and societal strata.

Note:
Length: 54
Creation-Date: 2024-12
Revision-Date:
File-URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp614
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:CRCTR224_2024_614