Believe it or not, but professor James Heckman from the University of Chicago, the author, wan the Nobel prize in economics. This paper, which shouldn't be taken too seriously though, (I suspect him trying to provocatively make a statistical argument rather than truly investigating the effects of prayer) Heckman uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings. The empirical conclusion from this analysis is "important" to the author: A little prayer does no good and may make things worse; much prayer helps a lot. The complete IZA paper, which is only three pages long, can be found here.
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