Unemployment and Church Creation: A Study of Evangelical Entrepreneurship in Brazil

• Grant number: 24/20308-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics
• Principal Investigator: Fábio Adriano Miessi Sanches
• Grantee: Fábio Adriano Miessi Sanches
• Host Institution: Escola de Economia de São Paulo (EESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Bladimir Carrillo Bermúdez ; Raphael Bottura Corbi

Abstract

This study explores the accelerated growth of the number of evangelical temples in Brazil over the last few decades, which increased from fewer than 900 temples in 1970 to more than 65,000 in 2018. The research seeks to understand who the individuals responsible for the creation of these temples are and what factors influence their decisions, with a focus on unemployment as a possible motivator. The central hypothesis is that the opening of churches has become a livelihood alternative amid unemployment. To investigate this hypothesis, the study will utilize microdata from the Annual List of Social Information (RAIS) regarding the employment history of formal workers, cross-referencing this information with data on partners and founders of religious temples available in public records from the Receita Federal (Internal Revenue Service). Using appropriate econometric methods, the research will seek to identify the causal effect of unemployment on the decision to establish a temple, allowing for an estimation of how much job loss contributes to the expansion of evangelical temples in Brazil. Additionally, a dynamic structural model will be estimated to analyze the discrete choices of the unemployed between opening a church, starting another type of formal or informal business, finding another job, or remaining out of the labor force. This exercise will allow for the calculation of the implicit payoffs of each choice, including the establishment of churches, as well as the possibility of conducting counterfactual analyses. This will provide a deeper understanding of the economic motivations behind the decisions to open temples and other economic activities. In addition to exploring the economic motivations for church creation, the study will contribute to the debate on the relationship between economic crises and changes in religious behavior, with potential implications for public policies related to religious entrepreneurship during times of crisis. (AU)