To Sin or Not to Sin: Studying Socio-Economic Impacts of Religious Agents Choices

This thesis investigates behavioral aspects of religious agents decision making when they believe to be punished for wrongdoing in the afterlife. In the thesis, a novel theoretical framework explaining the choices of sinning/non-sinning to be introduced, alongside with an empirical examination of a major religious event's impacts on observed behaviors of the faithful.

The theoretical framework targets to identify the circumstances under which agents optimally choose to sin. It aims to discover how the limitations of alternative resources can bound their choices and help rationalize sinning behaviors. A formal model of such preferences would explain the abundance of vice practices observed.

The theory proposed belongs to the dual-self models of principal-agent class and offers a new approach to solving problems arising in a complex personality. In my model, the tool kit of the religious planner is expanded to include an alternative consumption of goods and leisure as self-control resources. This resources are limited by the initial endowments. The solutions of the model are first-best, fully parametrized and corner, while all choices, of sinning and non-sinning, are rationalized as a function of the parameters.

The empirical part of the thesis focuses on a major Catholic event that grants full remission of sins to Catholics. The research question in this part is: How does the forgiveness obtained change the sinning patterns of Catholics?

In other words, the question is whether more, less or equal amount of crimes will be committed in the time-proximity to the event occurrence. The study to be conducted via two channels. The first path is to examine historical Italian time series data on crimes for a period during which a few events were held. The second route is to perform a conditional analysis on a longitudinal data set on European countries criminal activities count, recorded around the Great Jubilee of 2000 event celebration.

The results of the empirical study on the event's impacts on crimes levels show that Catholics committed less crimes during the event celebration. In Italy, where a number of Jubilees were celebrated, a particularly interesting pattern of crimes behavior around the event occurred.