There is a new NBER article by Rajeev Dehejia et al, which explores the influence of religious and social organizations in the lives of disadvantaged youth.
The authors consider a range of definitions of disadvantage in childhood (family income and poverty measures, family characteristics including parental education, and child characteristics including parental assessments of the child) and a range of outcome measures in adulthood (including education, income, and measures of health and psychological wellbeing), and concludes,
"Overall, we find strong evidence that youth with religiously active parents are less affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious services. These buffering effects of religious organizations are most pronounced when outcomes are measured by high school graduation or non-smoking and when disadvantage is measured by family resources or maternal education, but we also find buffering effects for a number of other outcome-disadvantage pairs. We generally find much weaker buffering effects for other social organizations."
"Religion plays an important role in how households respond to the disadvantages they face. Our results are especially strong when disadvantage is measured by maternal education and outcomes are measured by the youth’s educational attainment."
No comments:
Post a Comment