[go: up one dir, main page]

  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Religious Pluralism, Religious Market Shares and the Demand for Religious Schooling

Danny Cohen-Zada () and Todd Elder
Additional contact information
Danny Cohen-Zada: Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

No 1201, Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics

Abstract: We develop a model of school choice in which the demand for religious schooling is driven partly by the desire of parents to limit their children’s exposure to the influences of competing religions. This framework links the literature on the effects of religious market shares on the within-denomination intensity of religious activity with a separate literature relating religious pluralism to the overall level of religious participation. The model predicts that when a religious group’s share of the local population grows, the fraction of that group’s members whose children attend religious schools decreases. In addition, it implies that the overall demand for religious schooling is a positive function of both the local religiosity level and the level of religious pluralism, as measured by a Herfindahl Index. Using both U.S. county-level data and individual data from ECLS-K and NELS:88, we find evidence strongly consistent with the model’s predictions. Our findings also illustrate that failing to control for the local religiosity level in estimating the effect of religious pluralism on religious participation, as is common in previous studies, may lead a researcher to erroneously conclude that pluralism has a negative effect on participation.

Keywords: Religious participation; school choice; religious pluralism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/Econ/Workingpapers/1201.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:bgu:wpaper:1201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aamer Abu-Qarn ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-20
Handle: RePEc:bgu:wpaper:1201