Carmel Chiswick on ‘Religion in Transition, how economic choices effect religious behaviours'

How do ordinary people fit religious observance into a lifestyle that also includes important secular activities? Regardless of religious belief (theology), everyday religious observances require both time and money and thus compete with non-religious activities for a share of a person’s limited budgets. This lecture looks at how economic incentives affect these budgeting choices and thereby influence the religious observance and religious lifestyles of individuals and their religious communities. Professor Chiswick is a Development Economist and a Labor Economist. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the City of New York, where she studied economic development and economic history. She worked as an Economist at USAID, the United Nations, The World Bank, and the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to GWU. She frequently presents her research to academic conferences and community groups and has held several visiting appointments at universities in the U.S. and in Israel. She is currently Research Professor of Economics at George Washington University. She is also a Research Fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. Professor Chiswick’s research in labor and economic demography includes studies of household work, family formation, and immigration (impacts). Her research on economic development deals with problems related to employment and education, especially in Thailand, and with systems of household and labor force statistics. Her recent work focuses on the economics of religion, especially as it applies to demography (marriage, household formation, fertility, and childrearing), to religious ritual observance (by both individuals and institutions), and to religious market structure. https://iiep.gwu.edu/carmel-chiswick/