Religion and Education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study

Sarah Brown () and Karl Taylor

No 03/16, Discussion Papers in Economics from Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the determinants of one aspect of religious behaviour – church attendance – at the individual level using British data derived from the National Child Development Study (NCDS). To be specific, we focus on the relationship between education and church attendance, which has attracted some attention in the existing literature. In contrast to the previous literature in this area, our data allows us to explore the dynamic dimension to religious activity since the NCDS provides information on church attendance at three stages of an individual’s life cycle. The findings from our cross-section and panel data analysis, which treats education as an endogenous variable, support a positive association between education and church attendance. In addition, our findings suggest that current participation in religious activities is positively associated with past religious activities. Furthermore, our findings suggest that levels of religious activity tend to vary less over time suggesting that factors such as habit formation may be important.

Keywords: Church Attendance; Education; Human Capital; Religion. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.le.ac.uk/economics/research/RePEc/lec/leecon/dp03-16.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Religion and education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study (2007)
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:lec:leecon:03/16

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www2.le.ac.u ... -1/discussion-papers

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Economics from Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester School of Business, University of Leicester, University Road. Leicester. LE1 7RH. UK Provider-Homepage: https://le.ac.uk/school-of-business. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Abbie Sleath ().