Sacred Production, Secular Returns: Causal Evidence on the Economic Externalities of Catholic Canonization

ABSTRACT

The Catholic Church has canonized more saints in the past four decades than in the previous four centuries combined, yet we know almost nothing about what this accelerating institutional output accomplishes. We provide the first causal evidence on the religious and economic externalities of canonization, exploiting its staggered timing across 26 origin countries (2004–2019). Our difference‐in‐differences design accounts for the Vatican's strategic selection of origin countries and yields two results that bear directly on a central tension in the sociology of religion. Canonizations raise international tourist arrivals. Annual arrival growth runs roughly 5 percentage points above the counterfactual at the 2‐ and 3‐year horizons, about 3.5 points averaged over the first 4 post‐canonization years, and larger still in countries with a single canonization. The 3‐year effect remains significant whichever country is dropped, survives falsification tests on foreign direct investment and outbound travel, neither of which reacts to canonization, and concentrates in smaller countries, where national statistics can plausibly move. Canonizations show no detectable break in the trajectory of Catholic affiliation: Within each region, the observed 2010–2020 change in Catholic share is the same in treated and untreated countries. Institutional religious authority generates economic externalities without a measurable change in religious affiliation, a dissociation consistent with functional‐differentiation accounts of secularization. The Church produces saints; the saints are followed by tourists.