Item Detail
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22727
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0
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0
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English
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The Economics of Geographical Ward Boundaries in the LDS Church
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Logan, UT
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Utah State University
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11
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"Recently, Michael McBride published his article 'Club Mormon: free-riders, monitoring and exclusion in the LDS Church,' which highlights incentives at work in the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In his discussion of the Church's efforts to monitor its members, McBride mentions, almost in passing, that the Church uses geographical ward boundaries in order to maintain ward sizes small, since smaller congregations require fewer monitoring costs. In this paper, we argue that the Church uses geographical boundaries not only to control ward size, but also to stimulate the creation of religious capital. Ward boundaries do this by stabilizing the ratio of high-contributing to low-contributing members in a ward. This results in each ward collectively having a type of 'property right' over those within their boundaries. These aspects of ward boundaries increase the efficiency of religious capital production. We hypothesize that the benefits of thus restricting members choice of ward outweigh the associated costs." [Author's abstract]