Economics 286W
Honors Seminar
Spring
2002
Wednesdays 3:30-5
HRM 221
R. N. Langlois
322
Monteith X63472
Office
hours MW 1-3 or by appointment
Assignment 2
In recent years, mainstream economists have begun turning their attentions to aspects of human behavior outside of their traditional domain of prices and markets. We have already seen one manifestation of this in assignment 1: the business firm as an economic institution. But economists have pushed well beyond this to the economics of the law, of government bureaucracies and voting, of marriage and the family, of drug addiction, even of suicide. Among the most interesting of these instances of "economic imperialism" is the economics of religion. In our next presentation, Metin Cosgel will present a paper called "Rationality, Integrity, and Religious Behavior," which he has recently written with another faculty member, Lanse Minkler.
Your question is this: evaluate the attempt to use economic ideas to analyze religious behavior? Has it been successful? Which parts are the most or least successful? As before, you should take a position and defend it. In addition to the Cosgel-Minkler paper, the following readings may be of help. But, once again, concentrate on the argument and don't get lost doing research.
Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1998. "Introduction to the Economics of Religion," Journal of Economic Literature 36: 1465-96.
Kuran, Timur. 1994. "Religious Economics and the Economics of Religion," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150: 769-75.
Due: February 20.
