Race and Charitable Church Activity

The availability of public funding for charitable church activity has increased dramatically in the past decade. A key dispute over this increased availability is whether congregations' propensity to provide charitable services depends upon the racial composition of the community served. This paper uses three different congregation-level datasets to investigate how race affects charitable church activity. In all three datasets there is evidence that all-white congregations become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the local community grows. This response is found only when looking at charitable activities, not when looking at other types of church activity. Additionally, all-white congregations favorably disposed towards receiving government funding do not respond differently to black residents than do congregations which are not all-white.

The Church vs the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?

Recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation. An unanswered question in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation. In this paper we identify a policy-driven change in the opportunity cost of religious participation based on state laws that prohibit retail activity on Sunday, known as %u201Cblue laws.%u201D Many states have repealed these laws in recent years, raising the opportunity cost of religious participation. We construct a model which predicts, under fairly general conditions, that allowing retail activity on Sundays will lower attendance levels but may increase or decrease religious donations. We then use a variety of datasets to show that when a state repeals its blue laws religious attendance falls, and that church donations and spending fall as well. These results do not seem to be driven by declines in religiosity prior to the law change, nor do we see comparable declines in membership or giving to nonreligious organizations after a state repeals its laws. We then assess the effects of changes in these laws on drinking and drug use behavior in the NLSY. We find that repealing blue laws leads to an increase in drinking and drug use, and that this increase is found only among the initially religious individuals who were affected by the blue laws. The effect is economically significant; for example, the gap in heavy drinking between religious and non religious individuals falls by about half after the laws are repealed.

Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out during the Great Depression

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the New Deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state's congressional delegation, and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending. With both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939.

Diversity and Crowd-out: A Theory of Cold-Glow Giving

Research has repeatedly shown that altruism is lower in diverse communities. Can this phenomenon be counteracted by government intervention? To answer this question, this paper introduces diversity to the canonical model of "warm glow" giving. Diversity may have two effects on incentives: it may attenuate individuals' altruistic preferences for public goods, and it may "cool off" the warm glow that individuals get from voluntarism. Either of these effects leads to diverse communities having lower levels of public goods, consistent with prior research. However, these effects have opposite implications for the efficacy of government intervention. I then empirically investigate whether government intervention is more effective in diverse communities. For identification, I exploit the Supreme Court-mandated 1991 expansion of the SSI program. Using a new dataset of United Methodist churches from 1984 to 2000, the results show that the expansion of SSI crowded-out charitable spending by churches. The crowd-out estimate for the average church is reasonably large, but this masks significant differences in crowd-out between communities. Crowd-out occurred almost entirely in relatively homogeneous communities; there is only modest evidence of crowd-out in racially diverse communities. Thus diverse communities, while having the lowest levels of altruism, are in this instance the most amenable to government intervention.

The Power of the Pill for the Next Generation

In this paper we ask how the diffusion of oral contraception to young unmarried women affected the number and maternal characteristics of children born to these women. Using census data, we find that early pill access led to an increase in the share of children whose mothers were married, college-educated, and had professional occupations. The pill's effects on the average mother are different from the pill's effects on the average woman, and the effects of the pill on maternal characteristics are in some instances different from the effects of abortion. We investigate the mechanisms by which the pill led to these differential effects and find that access to the pill led to falls in short-term fertility rates for young women and led to decreases in lifetime fertility at the intensive and extensive margins. The impacts of the pill on household characteristics are thus associated with retiming of births, changes in the characteristics of potential mothers, changes in which women become mothers, and by reductions in completed family size. Finally, while the pill affected maternal characteristics differently than abortion, we find suggestive results that availability of the pill lowered abortions among young women.

Season of Birth and Later Outcomes: Old Questions, New Answers

Research has found that season of birth is associated with later health and professional outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. In this paper we consider a new explanation: that children born at different times in the year are conceived by women with different socioeconomic characteristics. We document large seasonal changes in the characteristics of women giving birth throughout the year in the United States. Children born in the winter are disproportionally born to women who are more likely to be teenagers and less likely to be married or have a high school degree. We show that controls for family background characteristics can explain up to half of the relationship between season of birth and adult outcomes. We then discuss the implications of this result for using season of birth as an instrumental variable; our findings suggest that, though popular, season-of-birth instruments may produce inconsistent estimates. Finally, we find that some of the seasonality in maternal characteristics is due to summer weather differentially affecting fertility patterns across socioeconomic groups.

Identifying Tax Effects on Charitable Giving

This paper estimates the effects of three federal tax acts—the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (H.R. 1836), the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (H.R. 2), and the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 (H.R. 1308)—on charitable giving, and offers four extensions relative to previous work. First, we use new data—the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study, the philanthropy module in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—that permit the estimation of the effect of switches in itemization status on giving. This is important because switches permit a direct answer to the question: How much of an increase in charitable giving is caused by tax deductibility? Second, the new data permit the estimation of tax effects on charitable giving to secular charities as well as to religious organizations. This is important because the main policy question in the literature on taxes and giving is to evaluate “treasury efficiency”—whether the Treasury can cause more money to flow to charitable organizations by allowing deductibility of giving than by eliminating deductibility and sending the increased tax revenue directly to charitable organizations. By using secular giving, we can focus on the type of giving most relevant to this policy question. Third, the new data allow for improved methodological approaches over past studies. Fourth, we argue that the 2001, 2003, and 2004 federal tax acts were timed such that they provide a set of tax changes suitable for identifying permanent effects of taxes on giving. The estimates based on the analysis of families who switch itemization status suggest that secular giving is price elastic, implying that treasury efficiency holds. In contrast, estimates which impose the restrictions facing other datasets suggest a statistically insignificant price elasticity

Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws' Repeal to Estimate the Effect of Religiosity on Voter Turnout

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity ("Blue laws") to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of Blue Laws caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. We measure the effect of Blue Laws' repeal on political participation and find that following the repeal turnout falls by approximately 1 percentage point. This turnout decline, which is statistically significant and fairly robust across model specifications, is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal influence on voter turnout.