Religious prohibition and sacrifice: evidence from the Amish restriction on high school education

Liang Wang

Journal of Demographic Economics, 2020, vol. 86, issue 3, 403-434

Abstract: The Amish collective objection to high school education and refusal to comply with compulsory schooling laws can be interpreted with a religious-club-good framework. According to the religious-club interpretation, the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious prohibition and sacrifice to improve the welfare of sect members. I exploit the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test several key predictions of the religious-club explanations. The evidence suggests that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals with low religious participation, lower members' shadow cost of time, and grow the sect through higher fertility.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Religious Prohibition and Sacrifice: Evidence from the Amish Restriction on High School Education (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:demeco:v:86:y:2020:i:3:p:403-434_8

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Demographic Economics from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().