Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Competition from the Catholic Sex-Abuse Scandal

Daniel Hungerman

No 17589, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper considers substituting one charitable activity for another in the context of religious practice. I examine the impact of the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal on both Catholic and non-Catholic religiosity. I find that the scandal led to a 2-million-member fall in the Catholic population that was compensated by an increase in non-Catholic participation and by an increase in non-affiliation. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the scandal generated over 3 billion dollars in donations to non-Catholic faiths. Those substituting out of Catholicism frequently chose highly dissimilar alternatives; for example, Baptist churches gained significantly from the scandal while the Episcopal Church did not. These results challenge several theories of religious participation and suggest that regulatory policies or other shocks specific to one religious group could have important spillover effects on other religious groups.

JEL-codes: H41 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: CH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as “Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Competition from the Catholic Sex-Abuse Scandal,” the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5(3) (2013), 227-253.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17589.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:17589

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17589

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().