Zubin Jelveh, a New York Times blogger, reports on a dubious IMF study, which draws upon the “Rapture Index” to suggest that “regions with high concentrations of evangelicals saw lower gains in home prices and less volatility than similar regions with fewer evangelical residents”:

To test this theory, Mr. Crowe looked at home prices before and after 9/11 and found that they fell sharply in non-evangelical areas but actually rose in evangelical ones. He next turned to the Rapture Index, which purports to track how close the end of the world could be. Mr. Crowe investigated how changes in the index matched up with home prices and found that up to 90 percent of the difference in price changes between evangelical and non-evangelical areas could be correlated with the Rapture index.

Expectations of the end of times can also affect how much wealth evangelicals accumulate over their lifetime. Using a survey of religious beliefs and household assets, Mr. Crowe found that people who believed in Armageddon were worth about 33 percent less than the average respondent. (Mr. Crowe is not the first to show this.) If you see belief in the after-life as a type of insurance against bad events, then this outcome makes sense.

Read the rest of the post here, and be sure to read the comment section, where commenters variously criticize the study’s methodology, evangelicals, religion, and each other.