Burlig & Stevens: Church Mergers and Technology Adoption

In Social Networks and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Church Mergers in the U.S. Midwest, Fiona Burlig (Public Policy, University of Chicago) and Andrew W. Stevens (Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin) consider how social networks increase agricultural technology adoption among farmers. While economists and policymakers have worked to find ways to reduce information barriers and understand how social networks impact the spread of information and facilitate technology adoption, social networks are particularly challenging to study from an empirical perspective, and research has largely considered how information is transmitted rather than how naturally-occurring changes in these networks affect economic activity.

By focusing on mergers between congregations of the American Lutheran Church in the Upper Midwest between 1959 and 1964, Burlig and Stevens were able to estimate the causal effects of increases in social network size and composition on technology adoption based on county-level data from the American Census of Agriculture. The article identifies how these mergers affected the adoption of chemical fertilizer, a relatively new technology of the time. After employing randomization inference methods and checks to isolate results attributable solely to congregational mergers, the authors found that increased information sharing between farmers due to congregational mergers resulted in an over 5% increase in chemical fertilizer usage and over a 10% relative increase in total fertilized acreage compared to counties without a church merger. Notably, congregational mergers did not lead to increases in the use of technologies already well established by the 1960s.

Burlig and Stevens acknowledge that without data on the structure and function of individual church congregations’ social networks and farm-level data on fertilizer use, there is no direct evidence to support the conclusion that congregational mergers affect fertilizer adoption. Nonetheless, the authors note that their findings suggest that among midwestern farmers, religious social networks can act as focal points for information diffusion and play a role in economic decision-making. They call for future research seeking out other naturally occurring shocks to social networks to better understand the within-network interactions that drive information diffusion.