More religion, better life outcomes

Torrential Jonathan Gruber has been in the news lately with his overly frank discussions of the origins and making of the Obamacare sausage. For all that he has become a political brick brat to be tossed about, he is originally and fundamentally an economist. Here is one of his papers from a few years ago, Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good For You? by Jonathan Gruber.

Religion remains an important aspect of life in the U.S. Yet we know very little about the impacts the religious participation has on economic outcomes. I have attempted to remedy this shortcoming by instrumenting for religious density with the extent to which others in an area share one’s religious heritage, and to study the impact of religious density on outcomes in the
Census IPUMS data.

The findings of this analysis are striking: a higher density of your religion in your area, as proxied by the ancestral mix of area residents, leads to significantly more religious participation, and to better outcomes along a variety of dimensions, such as education, income, and marital status. These effects are sizeable, and are robust to a variety of specification checks. And they
do not appear to be driven by selection of higher ability individuals into areas where there is more density of their religion

Well there you go, the science is settled.