Working Paper: NBER ID: w13369
Authors: Rajeev Dehejia; Thomas Deleire; Erzo F.P. Luttmer; Joshua Mitchell
Abstract: This paper examines whether participation in religious or other social organizations can help offset the negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged environment. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, we collect measures of disadvantage as well as parental involvement with religious and other social organizations when the youth were ages 3 to 19 and we observe their outcomes 13 to 15 years later. We 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). 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.
Keywords: religious organizations; social organizations; disadvantaged youth; buffering effects
JEL Codes: D10; I30; J62; Z12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| parental religious participation (Z12) | youth outcomes (I24) |
| disadvantage (D50) | youth outcomes (I24) |
| parental religious participation + disadvantage (Z12) | youth outcomes (I24) |
| religious organizations (Z12) | buffering effects on youth outcomes (I24) |
| disadvantage measured by family resources (I32) | youth outcomes (I24) |
| disadvantage measured by maternal education (I24) | youth outcomes (I24) |
| disadvantage (D50) | parental religious participation (Z12) |