The Effects of Religion on the Labor Supply of Married Women

Religion, Human Capital Investments, and the Family in the United States

“…Conservative Protestants stand out for their tendency to avoid cohabitation and enter marriage and childbearing at a young age (Lehrer 2004b;Glass and Jacobs 2005;Uecker and Stokes 2008;Fitzgerald and Glass 2008); their low level of education (Darnell and Sherkat 1997;Sherkat and Darnell 1999;Lehrer 1999;2004c;Glass and Jacobs 2005); greater asymmetry in the intra-household division of labor (Ellison and Bartkowski 2002); low levels of employment when young children are present in the household (Lehrer 1995;Sherkat 2000;Glass and Nath 2006); relatively high fertility (Lehrer 1996;Hout, Greeley and Wilde 2001); and low levels of female wages (Lehrer 2005) and of family wealth (Keister 2003(Keister , 2005(Keister , 2009a(Keister , 2009b. At the same time, non-Orthodox Jews tend to display opposite patterns, including delayed entry to marriage (Lehrer 2004b), low fertility (Mosher and Hendershot 1984); high educational attainment (Chiswick 1988;Lehrer 1999); high level of female employment except when young children are present in the household (Chiswick 1986;Hartman and Hartman 1996); high wages (Chiswick 1988;Lehrer 2005) and high levels of wealth (Keister 2003(Keister , 2005(Keister , 2009a).…”

“…Research on Mormons shows a pattern of unusually high fertility (Heaton 1986;Lehrer 1996); high marital stability among homogamous unions (Lehrer and Chiswick 1993); a low level of female employment (Heaton and Cornwall 1998) and low female wages (Lehrer 2005). As to Catholics, the major drop in religious commitment that followed Vatican II (Finke and Stark 2006) led to a convergence to the mainline Protestant pattern in virtually all areas of economic and demographic behavior Lehrer 1995Lehrer , 1999.…”

Conservative Protestants and Wealth: How Religion Perpetuates Asset Poverty

“…Religion affects parenting styles and relationships between parents and their children (Bartkowski and Ellison 1995;Ellison, Bartkowsi, and Segal 1996;Ellison and Sherkat 1993). There is also a strong relationship between religion and gender roles (Hertel and Hughes 1987;Peek, Lowe, and Williams 1991), including female educational attainment and labor force participation (Lehrer 1995;Sherkat 2000). As a result, religion is likely to affect occupational advancement, income, other financial benefits, the availability of funds to save, and ultimately wealth ownership.…”

“…There is a curvilinear relationship between family size and wealth: wealth increases somewhat in families with one to two children (compared to households with no children) as parents increase their saving and buy homes, but it then declines significantly in families with more than two children as expenses rise (Keister 2005). Moreover, because they tend to value a relatively traditional division of labor (Ellison and Bartkowski 2002;Gallagher and Smith 1999), CP women participate in paid work outside the home at low rates, particularly when their children are young (Lehrer 1995). Single-earner households-typically households in which the adult female is not employed outside the home-tend to have low income and limited resources available to save (Steen 1996).…”

Religion, Income Inequality, and the Size of the Government

“…1 Following the seminal work of Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975), economists have explored the potential interactions between religion and a variety of socio-economic variables. For example, Lehrer and Chiswick (1993) investigated religion's effects on marriages, Lehrer (1995), Lehrer (1996), and Lehrer (1999) on labor supply, fertility, and educational attainment, respectively. Barro More recently, research on the relationship between religion and its socio-economic correlates has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by higher levels of income inequality (Palani 2008, Rees 2009).…”