Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 23 July 2025, LG 4.154 (!!)
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 23 July 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 4.154. Wladislaw Mill (University of Mannheim) will be talking about “War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery”.
More information can be found here:
Does war make people more religious? Causal evidence on this important question has long been wanting. To provide that evidence, we exploit the Vietnam Draft Lottery – a natural experiment that drafted male U.S. citizens into military service during the Vietnam War. 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 causes higher religiosity: people who were randomly drafted to go to war are at least 20% more likely to have religious imagery on their gravestones. This effect holds up against multiple robustness and placebo tests, sets in almost immediately, persists even after 50 years, and generalizes across space and societal strata.