Working Paper: NBER ID: w19225
Authors: Jason Fletcher; Sanjeev Kumar
Abstract: Recent studies analyzing the effects of religion on various economic, social, health and political outcomes have been largely associational. Although some attempts have been made to establish causation using instrument variable (IV) or difference-in-difference (DID) methods, the instruments and the spatial and temporal variations used in these studies suffer from the usual issues that threaten the use of these identification techniques--validity of exclusion restrictions, quality of counterfactuals in the presence of spatial assortative sorting of people, and concern about omitted variable bias in the absence of information on family level unobservables and child-specific investment by families. During the adolescent years, religious participation might be a matter of limited choice for many individuals, as it is often heavily reliant on parents and family background more generally. Moreover, the focus of most of the studies has been on religious rites and rituals i.e., religious participation or on the intensity of participation. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this paper analyzes the effects of a broad set of measures of religiosity on substance use at different stages of the life course. In contrast to previous studies, we find positive effects of religion on reducing all addictive substance use during adolescence, but not in a consistent fashion during the later years for any other illicit drugs except for crystal meth and marijuana.
Keywords: Religion; Health Behaviors; Substance Use; Adolescents
JEL Codes: Z12; Z18
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Higher levels of religious participation (Z12) | Reductions in tobacco use (H23) |
| Higher levels of religious participation (Z12) | Reductions in alcohol consumption (L66) |
| Higher levels of religious participation (Z12) | Reductions in illicit drug use (K42) |
| Religious attendance (Z12) | Decrease in smoking rates (I12) |
| Religious attendance (Z12) | Decrease in binge drinking (I12) |
| Religious attendance (Z12) | Decrease in marijuana use (I12) |
| Importance of religion (Z12) | Lasting protective effect against substance use (I12) |
| Religion provides psychological tools (Z12) | Resist engaging in risky health behaviors (I12) |