Replication Data for: 'Praying for Rain'

Replication data and code for "Praying for Rain" by Jose A. Espin-Sanchez, Salvador Gil-Guirado, and Nicholas Ryan, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. We study rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. We present a model in which a religious authority tries to persuade people to believe by praying for rain at optimal times. Praying for rain can persuade only where the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time. We test this prediction using an original dataset of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain, and find that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 47% more likely to pray for rain. The replication package includes all data, code (R, Stata, and MATLAB), and documentation needed to reproduce the tables and figures in the paper and online appendix. The main analysis pipeline is executed via a single shell script (main.sh). An renv lockfile is provided for R package version control.