  Herteliu et al. (2015) have elsewhere analyzed the impact of religious
festivals on births in Romania. Here we broaden the analysis (i) by studying
the effect of Lent on marriages as well as births (ii) by analyzing a number of
other countries which allows a comparison with non-Orthodox countries. We also
introduce a new methodology which treats the data in a way that frees the
analysis from bias related to seasonal patterns of births and marriages. The
comparison between the effects on marriages and conceptions appears of
particular interest for it permits to assess the respective weighs of social
pressure on one hand and personal leanings on the other hand. Our analysis
reveals a strong effect of Lent on marriages with a reduction by 80% in
Orthodox countries and 40% in West European Catholic and Protestant countries.
Since the influence of Lent on conceptions is independent of any form of direct
social control one might expect the effect to be much smaller. In percentage
terms it is roughly 10 times smaller than the effect on marriage. The present
methodology opens the way to the accurate investigation of the impact of other
mobile religious periods (e.g. Ramadan) on various social phenomena (e.g.
suicide).
