The Roles of Faith and Faith Schooling in Educational, Economic, and Faith Outcomes

McKendrick, Andrew and Walker, Ian (2020) The Roles of Faith and Faith Schooling in Educational, Economic, and Faith Outcomes. Working Paper. Lancaster University, Department of Economics, Lancaster.

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Abstract

We examine the effects of intrinsic religiosity and faith-based schooling on short and longer-term outcomes among young people in England. Without an obvious quasi-experimental identification strategy we rely on a detailed dataset, a cohort study from England with an extensive range of household and school-level characteristics, to use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), augmented by the Oster (2019) test. Inverse Probability Weighting and mediation analysis are also employed. We show that an individual’s intrinsic religiosity is an important driver of short-term educational outcomes (age 16 test scores) and some longer-term outcomes (later Christian belief), while faith-based schooling plays a lesser role.