Event Details

The Economics Department are delighted to host the Economics Seminar Series

Our next external speaker is Amma Panin.

For visa reasons, Amma will have to give us the talk online. So the next external seminar will be online only.

Title: Using religious participation to insure mental health in Ghana

Abstract: Shocks to income—such as illness or crop loss—can significantly reduce welfare. Both the shock itself and its subsequent consequences may negatively impact mental health, exacerbating any reductions in welfare. I use panel data from Ghana to explore how religious participation mitigates the negative effects of income shocks. I show that people with a larger share of expenditure on religious goods are more resilient to shocks: they are less likely to withdraw from the labour force and they feel a smaller loss in subjective welfare. Part of this might be explained by the fact that religious people are also more cognitively resilient. After an income shock, they show fewer signs of depression and perform better on cognitive tasks.