The Church versus the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?^*

The Deterrent Effect of Death Penalty Eligibility: Evidence from the Adoption of Child Murder Eligibility Factors

“…Column 5 subsequently drops the additional stateyear covariates (e.g., unemployment rate). We estimate a nearly identical pattern of results in each case, suggesting that the estimated coefficients presented in Column 1 -3 are robust to any assumption regarding the linearity of omitted state-year factors and are otherwise not the spurious result of large changes in observed factors that happen to coincide with the adoption of child murder provisions (Gruber and Hungerman, 2008).…”

“…Using only the set of states that did not amend their statutes to add child murder eligibility over the sample period, we randomly generate (and assign) 5,000 sets of placebo laws and then estimate the specification used in Column 1 of Table III on each of these simulated sets of laws. We simulate the placebo set so that the expected distribution of placebo law changes over time matches the distribution of the child murder law changes that actually took place (Gruber and Hungerman 2008). We find that the child murder coefficient from the primary difference-in-difference specification estimated above (using actual variation in eligibility laws) is in the 2.1 st percentile of the empirical distribution of the 5000 estimated coefficient means from the above simulations.…”

Religious Participation versus Shopping: What Makes People Happier?

“…We also use data for Catholics and Protestants because they are more likely to attend church on Sundays. Non-Christian 2 The time of repeal for each state is reported in Table 1 of Gruber and Hungerman (2008). GH mention the reasons for dropping the remaining states from the analysis: in some states, blue laws regulations were made at the county and city levels while our data are at the state level; in a few states they could not verify when blue laws were repealed; four states were dropped because there were too many exceptions to their laws; and there were seven states that did not have retail blue laws at any time during the period of our analysis.…”

“…Following Gruber and Hungerman's (2008) (hereafter GH) novel approach, we identify the exogenous shift in the cost of religious participation from the repeal of so-called blue laws which regulate commerce on Sundays. The logic is that when blue laws are repealed, individuals can choose secular activities, such as working or shopping, that were heretofore unavailable on Sundays.…”

The Impact of Medical Liability Standards on Regional Variations in Physician Behavior: Evidence from the Adoption of National-Standard Rules

“…In those that include just one lead, I follow Gruber and Hungerman (2008) in observing behavior in the two-year period leading up to the reform, providing enough time to sufficiently assess prereform treatment rates.…”