The Effect of Education on Religion: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws. NBER Working Paper No. 16973.
By Daniel M. Hungerman. 2011
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
For over a century, social scientists have debated how educational attainment impacts religious belief. In this paper, I use Canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity. I find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious participation later in life. An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition; the estimates suggest that increases in schooling can explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12d62bac16222cef629cc7b00eea882ee87df0dc
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Education and gender role attitudes (2020, background): “…of the CSLs and the cross-province 1 A number of studies have shown that education reduces religiosity, religious acts, and superstitious belief (Hungerman 2014; Mocan and Pogorelova 2017), and higher education leads to a more positive reported attitude toward immigrants (d’Hombres and Nunziata…”
- The New Economics of Religion (2016, background): “Hungerman (2014) has pursued these identification issues further, showing how the club-goods model can be used to generate an empirical test for whether religious rules and proscriptions alter people’s behavior.”
- Testing theories of secularization and religious belief in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (2017, background): “Education does seem to contribute to lower levels of religiosity (Hungerman, 2014).”