Abstract
This paper quantifies the association between religions, religiosity and educational attainment of new lawful immigrants to the US. This paper considers a broad set of religions that includes most of the major religions of the world. Using data from the New Immigrant Survey (2003), we show that affiliation with religion is not necessarily associated with an increase in educational attainment. Muslim and “Other religion” immigrants have less education compared to the immigrants who are not affiliated with any religion. However, affiliation with the Jewish religion is associated with higher educational attainment for males. With regard to religiosity, our results show that high religiosity is associated with lower educational attainment, especially for females. We also outline alternative frameworks that provide insight about the mechanisms that link religion and religiosity with educational attainment.
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Notes
Results for the second outcome variable are available from the authors on request.
We experimented a little by altering this definition to check the robustness of our results. All the substantive results reported in this paper are robust to such changes.
In the survey, the question about religiosity was also asked to individuals who do not have any religious affiliation. About 93% of them are low religiosity. In our analysis of religiosity we restrict our sample to immigrants who have some religious affiliation. Our results do not change if we remove this restriction.
In the NIS data, respondents were asked about their family income. The exact question was “Now I'd like to ask you some questions about when you were a child. Thinking about the time when you were 16 years old, compared with families in the country where you grew up, would you say your family income during that time was far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?” In our regression analysis we use dummies for income status with average being the omitted category.
For some immigrants (about 31% in our sample) origin country is not identified but only origin region is identified. In those cases we use region fixed effects. All our qualitative results however still hold if we use data only on respondents for whom country is identified.
Details of these regressions are available in the working paper (University of Nevada Reno Economics Working paper # WP-09003) version. We also ran the regressions for India and Mexico separately. The results show that the qualitative results reported above remain unchanged.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jeanne Wendel and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any remaining error(s) are my responsibility.
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Mukhopadhyay, S. Religion, religiosity and educational attainment of immigrants to the USA. Rev Econ Household 9, 539–553 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9088-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9088-z